skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That day is very far into the future (in tech terms). 1.96 billion users are a whole fucking lot of a base to bleed. I would bet actual money that they won't dip below 1 billion by 2035, and that they would be still there (in whatever profitable form) with the same trademak in 2050.

While I broadly agree with you, I'd only bet money depending on the odds the bookie is giving, and I wouldn't bet on 1:1 odds either.

The reason is because those timescales are a full generation away. Since the entire value of FB is in the social network of people, it's possible that the upcoming generations bypass FB altogether for a competitor, and FB is unable to risk the pivot[1].

[1] FB might have to intentionally discard the aging existing users for the new users if the featureset that the new users want is exclusive with the featureset that the old users want.
I worked in a bank previously and we migrated all our databases from Oracle to MS SQL Server. I think we used like 7-8 years to do it so I can understand people who are hesistant to convert. I think the advantages at the time (this was 10 years ago) was lower price for the db servers but also more people who are familiar with Sql Server compared to Oracle.
And now I live in England, where a loud report really is a car backfiring. It has its problems, but I'm not likely to get shot or go bankrupt from a hospital bill.
It depends, I guess. I had dreams while under, at least once.
Most of the red zone around Moscow is situated on east and northeast, whereas "oligarch dachas" are mostly located directly west of Moscow (that hexagon is also red).

I think it's mostly aerospace installations apparent on that map, such as https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Медвежьи_Озёра_(центр_космичес...

Not sure what's going on in Pereslavl-Zalessky.

Having said that, of course GPS/GLONASS in the form of consumer phone-based navigation works just OK in Moscow. There is sometimes visible interference near the Kremlin though (your phone might suddently think it's in VKO).
Once upon a time my buddy was in the data center swapping drives, so i logged onto all the servers. 8 cabinets and like ~18 or so servers in each.

~$ base64 /dev/urandom

I don't know if that qualifies as 'changing my life' but when he told me he had to plug his ears and run away because it was so loud, it certainly made me want to turn this into a long-term career.
When I was a little kid, I was at a department store and saw a guy doing something with a television. Or so I thought.

Me: What are you doing?

He: I am programming. What's your name?

Me: MG

He: Check this out:

10 PRINT "MG"
20 GOTO 10

Me: Woah!

I picked a book from a shelf about "Basic" and started to try figuring out how this worked. And never stopped. Have been looking at these "televisions" more than anything else since then.
Hi all,

I'm one of the authors of the reply and it was very interesting reading so many diverse thoughts and comments. I would love to respond to all of them, but it would take ages. Luckily, Stuart Ritchie (@StuartJRitchie) wrote an awesome post on his substack (https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/nudge-meta) that goes much deeper and adresses many questions and the fair critique raised here.

Also, note that there is only a limited amount of information and nuance you can comprise into a strict 500 words reply limit in PNAS, which is the reason we focus only on one aspect of the original meta-analysis -- publication bias.

Cheers,
Frantisek
Maybe, but would that be the same you, or as though someone had made a copy of you?
China responded to criticisms by blaming the US for "hyping up fears" over the rocket reentry and accused US scientists and NASA of "acting against their conscience" and being "anti-intellectual."

When the PRC government are screaming and kicking and pointing fingers you can always lean back and relax in the knowledge that this is their way of communicating 'guilty as charged'.
You're close to the fundamental problem here but don't go far enough.

All one needs to do is look at Oliver Sack's books to understand that either of these must be true:

1. Consciousness is a physical system. This is the simplest explanation and accounts for all observed phenomenon.

2. Consciousness (or "soul") is metaphysical but is such a blank slate or so dependent on the physical state of the brain that we can exclude all consideration of it. Memory is clearly physical otherwise brain damage wouldn't ruin only some memories or the ability to comprehend certain things (such as right-left agnosias where someone loses the concept of the left side of the world both currently and in recalled memories). Brain chemistry very _obviously_ influences mood. Mind-altering drugs can induce temporary personality changes. It goes way beyond simple "radio receiver" analogies like alcohol inducing distortions. Your ability to understand anything at all, your ability to remember anything at all, even your personality can be dramatically affected by brain chemistry and physical state.

There are just so very many examples of real situations involving the brain that require extremely complicated hoop-jumping to maintain the idea that "you" are anything beyond the physical process happening in your brain. They all devolve into claims that the metaphysical essence is so dependent on and influenced by physical brain processes you can just cut out the metaphysical part with no loss.

If a stroke or dementia can make me a much angrier or violent person then what need is there for a soul?
Many reasons have been stated but I would like to add one:

It does not matter and it would only hurt your feelings.

This is not solely about you or them its a match between the two.

Therefore its the same thing as asking a girl "why dont you like me? I am a such good guy". There simply are no answers for this.
The second that causes problems for the entire Internet
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are publicly trying to cancel leap second – an additional mark that synchronizes clocks with the actual rotation of the Earth. The governments of France and the United States joined the technological giants.
There's probably a "free vs open software discussion" interpretation hidden in there somewhere
Show HN: A Printf Debugging Tool in Golang
I'm in Germany, and I've always liked McDonalds. I enjoyed eating there maybe a handful of times a year, even when doing so was considered "uncouth" by the majority of the people I know.

No more. Why? Because they've stopped selling burgers.

They've switched almost all of their restaurants to a "made to order" model, wherein they assemble your order on demand from warming trays, instead of producing them ahead and storing them in this huge heated cabinet.

Now the result looks exactly like the product shot on the menu, but is so lukewarm that the cheese hasn't even melted. That's not a burger, that's a at best a strange sandwich.
Pepys, you rapscallion, what are you doing here? How is the stone?
> The "slow web" never left.

i wish we had usage stats that were as simple as FB or insta’s “monthly active users”. because i feel like there’s an ebb and flow to this. 15 years ago, blogs had comment sections, pingbacks, RSS. 10 years ago, SEO displaced the blog. 5 years ago, blogs grew again with Twitter announcements replacing the role of RSS. today, email lists are back in style and my friends ask me for RSS reader recommendations.

then there’s the whole aspect of forums. most of the forums i used growing up are effectively dead. on the other hand, there are still new ones i run across monthly. it’s very difficult for me to separate my own trajectory from the overall “small web” trajectory: i just wish i knew of clean stats to illuminate the true state of things.
The title says it all. I did this to learn golang. Feedback is warmly welcomed!
Maybe you want to connect with Bert Hubert. https://berthub.eu/ He gave an interesting talk about GPS, and other global positioning systems on MCH2022: https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-17-how-do-gps-galileo-really-...
OpenRAN – 5G hacking just got a lot more interesting
Yes, they are more specific routes than 0/0. In Linux can also have a metric, so if two routes are equal one can be preferred over the other. On networking devices you usually have administrative distance (different routing protocols) and metric (within one routing protocol).
> In fact, non-material monist views exist!

Also see Buddhist philosophy such as Yogacara
> and the available clients are vastly superior to what Matrix and Signal offer

Care to elaborate?
I would actually love that. I need fast random access to data that never changes. SSDs are an overkill and too expensive, HDDs are too slow
Yeah, this. Mules, you’ve gotta buy with money from the rich dude with a horse. Donkeys, you just need two donkeys and a winter and you have three donkeys. You’d be amazed at what they’d stagger around under, particularly when people are getting firewood in. Not unusual to see little donkey-carts on the road, too - usually the man riding/driving and the wife walking alongside picking up whatever falls off, as that’s how they do things here - surprised they don’t feed their wives donkey bread too. I guess it ties to the same thing - poverty, and free labour and energy. Big families back in the day - the younger (60s/70s) generation all have seven siblings and a hundred cousins.
> Instead it installs rules for 0.0.0.0/1 and 128.0.0.0/1, creating a rule that has slightly higher priority

More specific prefix isn’t slightly better, prefix length is one of the most significant rules of routing. This trick is quite common in networking - you point more specific routes to the main link and less specific to a backup. It the main link go down the specifics are getting withdrawn (some mechanism like dynamic routing should be in place for that) and the less specific route takes place, redirecting the traffic over the backup link.
I would say .com extension as an indication of an executable is acceptable exactly because we are on HackerNews (and not W3Schools.com, for instance). Basically, IMHO, "hackers" are supposed to know a bit of (arcane) history as well: "hacking", to me, presumes a deeper investment in the field. Otherwise, they might only be (web) software developers (or engineers).

But to each their own.

(I think the most unfortunate thing is what content is present on the python.com domain, as a sibling comment highlighted)
The article discusses this. Some people who are given low doses of anaesthetic, usually due to potential risks, do report some awareness. On the flip side, even though during normal sleep we experience some semi-conscious dream states, there are other phases of sleep that are a complete blank. So conciseness seems to exist on a continuum from full alertness all the way down to nothing.
One reason is that it's easier not to. LinkedIn automatically sends you a generic rejection email 2-3 days after you've been rejected by the company.
I have more contacts on Matrix than on Signal, and that's really saying something.

WhatsApp brought encryption to the masses. Sure, they did so using Signal's code, but they could've picked any code base for E2EE. Even XMPP has secure encryption.

Signal is "that alternate WhatsApp some people use".
So American companies are now stealing Chinese solutions? :-)
Ask HN: Has GPL ever been successfully enforced against a handset manufacturer?
I assume they're not the only ones, but Xiaomi (a major Chinese manufacturer of Android phones sold both in China and globally) hasn't released Linux kernel sources for any devices released in the last seven months [0], and they've released 50+ devices (!) in that time [1].

Has there ever been a successful enforcement (or even an attempted enforcement) of the GPL against a handset manufacturer?

What are the options for handset users to attempt to force them to uphold their obligations?

Why does Google allow them to continue to be part of the Android platform (use Android trademarks, carry built-in support for Google services, etc) while they violate the GPL?

[0] https://github.com/MiCode/Xiaomi_Kernel_OpenSource

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi-phones-80.php
My chosen family (most of the people of my bio family I kept in touch with have passed on) are very much like that, but I keep in touch with them via a mixture of IRC, gchat and twitter DMs (fascinatingly the one member of my bio family I enjoy talking to who's still here uses twitter DMs to talk to me.)

The people who're local to me I catch up with in person, and regularly get "oh, yeah, you're not on facebook, I can actually tell you about this" with a huge grin and it's a big happy for me every time.

I've found that for whatever reason people's twitter feeds are "stuff I've found interesting" and I catch up with them separately from that, which I've found fine.

(note: this is an observation of what works for me, please don't consider this as in any was a criticism of your use of facebook if it's working for you, keeping in touch with people is awesome and "whatever works for that is good" applies)
That's not at all what I've said. Complaining about what someone's doing and how you feel about it are different from claiming you know what a person is about.

Also, most complaints about people could benefit from a dose of compassion and humility.

But what you're saying is definitely not at all what I'm suggesting.
I had a religious experience decades ago. Stone cold sober. I only talk about it with my closest friends, because I don't want to be perceived as another nutter. But it keeps me up when I am feeling down, and holds out the promise of living a life on a proper path. My 0,02€, YMMV.
First native lightning network and Bitcoin powered book
This is of course not a "fix" for science (I don't believe such a universal fix actually exists), but a method to highly increase the effectiveness of the scientific process:

Let the scientists simply do science or teaching (which is actually a method to educate the next generation of scientists) instead of having them handle an insane amount of academic bureaucracy in their work time.
You are underestimating how vast Russia (and Ukraine) are.

Moscow is out of reach even for the longest range (300km) HIMARS missiles which are not supplied to the Ukraine.

GPS jamming protects Russia's command and control structures from American intermediate range cruise missiles that can be launched from Mk41 launchers in Romania and Poland as well as from American ships.
> You can also get a prepaid SIM anonymously

That's actually harder than you may think in more and more countries. Even with VoIP it's hard to not associate your banking details with your phone number. It won't be long until anonymous phone numbers will disappear again.
In Experiment, AI Successfully Impersonates Famous Philosopher
It is garbage collected and a new mind is constructed on wakeup.
I wonder who hates their product more - Facebook or Twitter?
Some of which we were actually right about.

By the way, Apple only survived thanks to Microsoft money and being reverse acquired by NeXT.
> Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory.

> Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so

Backtracking a bit from that little word "theory", it's foremost about being able to formulate predictions about the real world. So, designing a suspension bridge over there, how much steel do use per cable? 1 ton? 2 tons? 42? Use the eight consciousnesses, sure, but get the answer, build the bridge, and be the first one to cross it.

If you don't have two competing theories that offer a prediction, there is nothing to apply the Occam's razor to.

A theory which is a mix of physics (for steel bridges, etc.) and Buddhism (for this or that domain) does work for many predictions. It is also inherently much more complex than "only use physics".
Never have I felt so personally attacked! Have you ever found a solution?
Thank you - now just have to await for their "planned" x86 includion into this program. Sadly lost all my old unix server in a move decade ago :(
Anecdotal, but as a hiring manager, I've interacted with only one person from Harvard, he was very impressed with himself and knew how to talk but when we asked him to do a small test project (we paid him for), the work he did was really not great. He took a long time to deliver something that barely worked, didn't follow best practices/common idioms of the framework he was using (framework that he selected by himself and supposedly had 2 years of experience in). He was also extremely aggressive in salary negotiations which is fine if you can deliver (and I know people who made a lot of money by being good at salary negotiation) but less so when you can't.

I've worked with quite a few MIT graduates and overall they've all been very good at what they do. So, sample size of one in the case of Harvard but I think Ivy leagues are not all created equal for a given major.
Am I the only one who thinks we are asking the wrong questions here?

Our consciousness is restored when we wake up. But this consciousness can only be considered as such when we are aware of it. Can there be consciousness without self-awareness? Is a deer conscious if not self-aware of its own consciousness? Is an organism with a primitive nervous system conscious? One that purely interacts with its world through simple stimuli?

If you sleep and wake up, does it matter if it's you or not? If we think that our consciousness is purely manifested through our physical, neural connections, than are we ever different, original, born or dead? A physical phenomena such as consciousness is infinitely malleable just like matter.

Being born and then when dead, do you stop existing? Since you're physical, what prevents those same physical patterns emerging again and making you exist once again? Just like when you're asleep, or under anesthesia. Your consciousness, your awareness of time and space stops existing, and once you wake up, you can proclaim that you're still you, because your memories and sense of self are still intact. But what if they weren't? You'd believe you're somewhere else, right? What if you simply died and woke up in another body? But what does that mean? Reincarnation is possible? But wait, if reincarnation is possible, does that mean that everyone who was born and died, will exist once again? Is there a queue for this stuff? N amount of people born out of nothing, are now on a queue to be reborn as something else? Doesn't make sense. But ask, did you ever truly exist? You became out of nothing, rather we consider it "nothing", but again, it's just matter, and now you're something, and then you think you'll either go nowhere, or somewhere else? Another universe? Another body? If two clones exist, do both of them experience reality, does consciousness switch between those bodies rapidly like it's something that exists independently, or do both of them exist at the same time? If one of them dies, does the other consciousness merge into the other? Or dies it go into nonexistence, or does it get reborn? Seriously, it just does not make sense. The questions don't either. We need to approach this differently.

What prevents someone from "not existing". What shackles are there to keep your consciousness to be entirely unique and never reproducible? If we consider it's physical, there are none.

I don't know if all of these rambles made sense, but this reply may sink with the ship, so I just had to get it out.
The margins are better on "premium, made-to-order" food so they do this to justify their increased prices. Unfortunately this is working well for them, and at scale, people don't seem to care about the extra wait: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros....

Another way to look at this is that McDonald's is making customers feel like they're getting restaurant quality food for less money. Personally, like you, I miss the cheap fast food.
This is something legislation could fix. Harvesting emails for spamming from GitHub commits is not much different from taking parked cars for a joyride: they might be in the open, but not for you.
Virtually all of the oligarch dachas are actually to the west of Moscow; Wikimapia shows though that there are some military areas such as firing ranges and artillery ammo dumps to the east.
I am not denying that the chicken became tasty over night. Time in a practical sense has "passed" but what really happened empirically was just a stream of perceptions, one of these perceptions is the story that hours have passed while you were sleeping. There is a subtle distinction, but I get it, its not easy to grok. I struggle with this myself, it's more of an intuition at this point.

Imagine to let go of all stories your mind comes up with to make sense of sleep and time, what is left? In that state there is simply no sleep happening, only perception and movement.
Those two seem very different to me.

Discord, to me, is "shiny consumer IRC that I hate" (I similarly consider Slack to be "shiny commercial IRC that I hate").

Whatsapp, to me, is "the thing I use to replace SMS when I'm talking to people in other countries and don't want my phone bill to explode."
Two New Tech Bills Could Transform U.S. Innovation–If Congress Acts
When we moved to Linux, Valgrind was THE tool that saved our as*s day after day after day. An issue in production? rollback, valgrind, fix, push, repeat. Thank you for all the hard work, in fact i don't i can thank you enough.
It is interesting how it is done by Lego themselves. Given the quality and accuracy of the manuals I always assumed that they are machine generated.
Cats Are an Alien Invasive Species, Poland Declares
Similar advice if you make electronic music: always save lossless raw audio (wav, flac etc), not just project files. Software updates break project files, hardware updates break old software, backwards compatibility is often imperfect, licenses expire, old VST plugins become unusable, source files for the project become lost, etc. It's always safer to have a pure raw audio export of all your projects even if they're unfinished because there's a chance you'll want to use or reference those unfinished snippets in the future.
I can't grok why do people have so much issue with accepting the simplest explanation - physical laws still apply and our minds exist within them, as part of that grey goo inside of our skulls. Isn't it already amazing enough that something like that is possible?

I mean we don't believe in fairies and santa claus anymore since we know how and why they were made up, but sure there is some utterly inexplainable magic that breaks all physical laws that we know... just to feel more special? Give our immortality a chance?

I do believe a lot of weird, illogical and sometimes completely fucked up beliefs simply come from common utter dismay of most folks when confronted with their mortality and the very real and perfectly fine chance that once we die that's it, our version of this universe and all of our experiences, loves and fears will simply vanish, forever. Every single religion primarily address this fear, the rest are mostly rituals folks made up early enough for them to stick around and management political structures just like in any other office.

For people brought up in religion this is simply unacceptable, whole world falling apart. Why any parent still does this to their children is completely beyond me, but I guess road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

I may be wrong and most logical solution may not be the right one, and that would make me in fact very happy. But religious people are mentally cornered, they can't accept any other option without their world breaking apart in the seams. That's a position of weakness and fear on the most important topic in life.
"Memetic Unit of Culture" would be an excellent Banksian Culture ship name.

Edit: Got to be a GCU really.