skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This proposed improvement in the way RCT's are conducted could have a big impact on the speed of drug discovery: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.02876.pdf
Oops, sorry, I confused you with kcl. :)
Right, I’m not wondering what human-like goals an AGI would have. I’m wondering what AGI-goals an AGI would have. How would it keep itself busy to have meaning?

For instance, would its prime goal be to continue up leveling its intelligence?
Big companies have lots of assets on their balance sheets. Mostly this is “cash equivalents” like short-term US Treasury debt, or overnight repo agreements. But they also have equity stakes in other companies like the one described here. The cash equivalents don't change in value, but the equity stakes do, and unrealized losses on equity can make their way into the operating statement and ruin a quarter. So CFOs use options and futures to hedge against these risks, by betting that the stock will go down.

If the equity stake is 5% or more, they have to report every transaction to the SEC, and when that filing became public, the headline would be “MICROSOFT IS SHORTING APPLE!” and would lead to at least a short term decline in Apple stock. So Jobs’ suggestion is that they either take a 4.99% stake that dispenses with all reporting requirements, or forego hedging for 9 months.
If you've just moved to Sydney, then there's a reasonably good chance of spotting them if you live outside of the city itself and walk around near bushland.

The /r/sydney subreddit is regularly full of reports of people spotting them when the Echidnas are more active during mating season.
Really well made! The magnet-based propeller is really clever.
I was curious to understand how the depth control worked and the associated blog is very informative. Turns out this is version 4 and he had tried other approaches before. The video makes it look too easy but seems he went into a lot of trouble to keep everything sealed properly.

https://brickexperimentchannel.wordpress.com/rc-submarine-4-...
A microbial organism pulls electricity from water in the air
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/25/23277003/papers-please-mo...

> He added that the game would be available as an update to the 2014 iPad app
Alientek DS-100 ($100 + built-in screen vs. screenless 'Digilent Analog Discovery 2' @ $400 or 'Pokit Pro' @ $270). For a bench, cheaper than Rigol is UNI-T UTD2102CEX ($200 vs $450).
sorry, meant cpp! C (apparently) uses a function that more closely resembles Excel
Here's another way to say the general idea, by way of example. Secretly, list is "the" exemplary universal monoid. Given any `a`, then `list a` gives you the free monoid generated by `a`, with composition given by `++` and the identity given by `[]`. Now, let's say you have some `a` such that you're able to come up with a function `ev : list a -> a` that's a monad algebra (i.e., it satisfies the two axioms given by yccs27). Then you're able to conclude that `a` is a monoid(!) and you can extract the monoid structure in the following way: `\ (x y : a) -> ev [x, y]` is the binary operation and `ev []` is the unit. (In particular, `ev` must be some `list.fold`.)

I called it `ev` because it's an evaluator/interpreter. To be able to write such a `m a -> a` function, `a` needs to have the same kind of structure that `m` is somehow representing, and you need to be able to map the operation that `m` "contains" to corresponding operations for `a`.

This is that business about free monads being useful for organizing how you write interpreters I believe.
I'm glad the issues in France won't have too bad of an impact. But that's somewhat besides the point. The cause of the electricity shortage is the enormous overreliance on Russian gas and oil. It's not about renewables vs. Nuclear.

The comment I responded to argued nuclear is superior in a situation of crisis, and selects as an example a natural disaster. Wanted to point out that this seems to depend rather sensitively on the kind of crisis.
In case people don't know this story, or worse, believe the conspiracy theories, here's what happened with the development of DES:

> "According to Steven Levy, IBM Watson researchers discovered differential cryptanalytic attacks in 1974 and were asked by the NSA to keep the technique secret. Coppersmith explains IBM's secrecy decision by saying, "that was because [differential cryptanalysis] can be a very powerful tool, used against many schemes, and there was concern that such information in the public domain could adversely affect national security." Levy quotes Walter Tuchman: "[t]hey asked us to stamp all our documents confidential... We actually put a number on each one and locked them up in safes, because they were considered U.S. government classified. They said do it. So I did it".

Bruce Schneier observed that "It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA 'tweaks' actually improved the security of DES."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard
No money was created in the above example because neither Alice nor Bob are banks. You could also argue that even if Alice was a bank, there is no actual problem because the money has not actually been created, the bank is merely claiming the money is there, as people discover from time to time when there's a bank run.

"And when the debt was finally paid off by Bob, Bob is poor again."

Not quite. The above example is a thought experiment just to demonstrate that a common argument about money is false, but if we want to take it seriously then by the end of the process Bob has no money but he now owns a productive business. In reality of course there are more people than just Alice and Bob, so Bob will hopefully sell to more people and get rich that way.

"So it follows that the only way to pay off existing debts is to create more debt because of debt is repaid with just "work", wealth is destroyed, leading to recession/depression."

You're mixing up several different concepts. No wealth was destroyed in the Alice/Bob example. Both Alice and Bob ended up richer. Alice ended up with widgets, and Bob ended up with a business. Wealth was created, not destroyed.
About Large Files on GitHub
Your honor is independent of the honor of the other party.
>"you see, this open-source software is not or poorly maintained"

They could just as easily be saying "wow, look at this OSS project, there are so many feature requests they can't keep up. Seems like it's valuable; people really make use of it. Let's hire!"
I'm sure many people have had covid-related brain damage, but I think a lot of people are also experiencing social and memory recall issues simply because they've been having far fewer social interactions. Social skills are "use-it-or-lose-it," and people who go through ascetic periods have great difficulty regaining the ability to have a normal conversation.
"I have tinnitus"

Summer Night • As a change from loud white noise, try the sound of insects, singing at night. You're welcome!

Interestingly, as someone with tinnitus, I found the sounds of cicadas to be very painful on my trail runs. I guess I am not alone:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-experts-cicada-proble...

Hopefully they are not in the sound clip :P
Accepting a risk of loss is not granting a license to steal.
I have found that a good way to engage in these situations is not to debate their request, but instead to simply state what things you ARE doing and why. So you avoid getting dragged into a discussion.

You don’t need to engage with someone’s question on their terms.
They won't deform but they still move and collide and that could be used to generate sound. Deformations could also be modeled by splitting parts into pieces connected by compliant joints.
I like people like you.
Was once [ignorantly] trying to help encourage an echidna to get off a busy road next to my house, but it burrowed down into the cement curb gutter. It managed to use its quills to hold onto the cement, and there was not a chance of moving it. I couldn't believe how strongly it could hold onto what I thought as smooth cement.
What is "LV2"?
Often just OK is just OK. And fast builds have enduring appeal.

But even masochism can get too comfortable.
LINQ lets you write SQL queries using the (.NET) language in which you write all your other code. This means you get to take full advantage of the language (and language service) features, including the typechecker, code completion etc.

Examples: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/writing-complex-querie...

The hard bit here is making sure the language type-checker is fully aware of the involved types, both while writing the query as well as while selecting the results to be returned

This approach has since been copied in more capable languages. One of my favorite examples lately is Rust's Diesel: https://diesel.rs/ (see the "complex queries") example.

A query language designer aware of the above lessons learned with SQL might take special care to ensure their new query language is easier to model in existing languages. For example, they might consider an alternative OOP or FP based syntax, or to generalize they might put some thought into what would make it easy to write a type-safe query builder. After all, while SQL was developed in 197x and we had a different model for data access early on (stored procedures instead of flexible language-integrated queries) so its easier to understand that we didn't consider integration with other languags. TypeScript already did exist when GraphQL first appeared in 2015, and it's been 7 years of LINQ at that point.

Yet, we still went the stored procedures route. Tools such as graphql-codegen [1] require you to regenerate your types every time you edit your query strings

[1]: https://www.graphql-code-generator.com/
Tight loops in higher-level languages generally always have yield points/opportunities to break provided by the runtime, even if the loop itself doesn't appear to have any.
Firefox mobile + UBO brings the future to you today.
Ask HN: Dangerous to drive with phone to navigate set to walk mode unaware?
This happened to me today with a passenger trying to help me find my way, and I was shocked how beguiling this predicament found me. I actually think someone could get hurt by making the same oversight.
Haxe is very much a games language, it started out (IIRC) as an ActionScript compiler by a game studio (Motion Twin, now most famous for Dead Cells) who was sick of trying to program in the shitty bare-minimum editor built into Flash, and evolved into its own language that compiled to the Flash plug-in’s VM. Motion Twin released it and its support tools as open source, and a lot of other Flash game devs picked it up.
1) because there was mockery.

2) you say it's representations all the way down? Well it doesn't look that way to me. Or the author apparently. So that's two of us.

3) go with extremely unlikely then. Don't trip over it.
I refused to buy any of those solar eclipse goggles from Amazon. No amount of "sorry" and $millions is worth losing eyesight over.
https://thrig.github.io/2022/08/06/control+c.html probably gets you close enough
Best language for discord bot development
I recently started messing around with this Python discord library, creating my own discord bot for entertaining purposes mainly.

Just wanted to know which are the most used programming languages for this sort of projects and what are your thoughts on them.
Arstechnica did a war stories with him on Return of the Obra Dinn, combining one of my fave video series with one of my fave gamedevs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMi6xgdSbMA
Turns out you can make any meal unhealthy if you include half a pound of sugar.
The problem with this logic is that a whole lot of products on Amazon (even those labeled as Prime) are fulfilled by Amazon for third party small businesses. I own one of those businesses, and getting Amazon to pay up when they screw something up or lose something is a huge pain. At my product price points of $12-30, it's not even worth my time to bother any more. For a very expensive product where it's clearly worth it, somebody's spending hours on the phone trying to get it made right.
I love vifm! It honors the vim philosophy — it’s fast, configurable, and keyboard driven. I have it integrated with vim so that when I press “-“ it toggles a directory view. So seamless that it’s hard to tell that they’re separate apps.
Well maybe then it only proves people don’t read the articles they comment on :)
Maybe -- but the context to understand what Debussy and Ravel were doing (maybe not Scriabin) is to get the Bach / Haydn / Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert under your belt.

Source: I've taught this at university.
> MDs don't offer clinical tests for "inflammation"

Yes they do, there are a bunch of routine tests. They are typically only ordered when they are clinically relevant, but if you went to a clinic and asked for a CRP and sedimentation rate (or whatever) I doubt it would be that hard to get one.

Other good tests are IL-1 and TNFa, but I don’t think those are routine or cheap.

> allopathy / [evidence-based medicine] doesn’t recognize “inflammation” as a symptom caused by our diets, or something they can prevent, beyond prescribing ibuprofen to allegedly reduce it.

Yes it does, but it’s not so simple. The causes of inflammation are multifactorial and there usually is not a quick or easy fix.

Ibuprofen clearly does reduce inflammation, but it obviously is different than attacking the problem at the source. Most doctors unfortunately don’t have time to sit you down and make a detailed plan for improving your diet, to stop smoking and drinking, and to exercise more. Most if not all medical schools teach this in Canada/US afaik (I speak from experience), and the medical literature is certainly packed with papers on the subject… but the resource constraints (not enough time, too many patients with urgent needs) on the job mean that theory and practice are not exactly the same.

That’s not a failing of medical science, it’s a failing of our administrative and political systems.
Sure, it's different. The claim was that traffic enforcement via fine doesn't improve safety; I've shown that a form of traffic enforcement via fine does.

I've heard just about every driver I've ever talked to repeat the "red light cameras cause rear-ends" claim, but the only evidence I've seen shows that they decrease rear-ends. That makes more intuitive sense to me: most people have regular commutes, and you learn to follow the traffic laws after the first handful of tickets.
What am I going to do with all that extra time?
> The blog post alone makes you want to purchase whatever this person has been working on based on how much passion is oozing off the explanation of how it's made.

Papers Please is nice, but Return of the Obra Dinn is a masterpiece. Honestly. A very cool concept with some impressive attention to detail. Pixel-perfect 1-bit dithered graphics, amazing soundtrack, and a nice story. I don’t have a link here but there was a forum thread somewhere where he discussed his progress as he was making the game. It’s a bit long but we’ll worth a read as well.
Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?
There is a bunch of editors with the traditional model of inserting text with the keyboard, arrows move the cursor around, you click around in menus/using hotkeys to perform actions (Visual Studio Code, Atom, Eclipse). Then there is the "modal" editors that have different modes where you can switch between for example "editing" or "movement" modes, and what your keyboard controls depends on the mode you're in (editors like Vim). Otherwise there is also very interactive and extensible editors, where eval basically lives within/together with the editor (Emacs, LightTable)

Otherwise, most editors fit in somewhere along those lines.

But what other editors is there out there that have something really different for editing/writing code? Things that come to mind is "editors" like Scratch where you aren't really "editing" code with your keyboard, but moving things around instead. Or, if I imagine I'd create a editor for programming controlled by a joystick, what kind of UI and UX would that editor have?
Haha, yes I thought so but my experience on hn is any humor gets misread so just felt like I needed to clarify in case anyone thought I was a monster who goes around punting monotremes.
Hi Tony,

Why do you hijack my browser's back button so I can't leave your site?

Since you're monitoring this thread on HN, I was going to point out an error on the site, but no matter how many times I pressed Back, I couldn't get here that way. I ended up closing the tab and going back to the HN home page.

Since you think your site is more important than my time, now you can go find the error on your own.
That's like 5% or so, for the first one. Could easily be significant.

It's also probably worth mentioning that the range of those values is likely less than 10, in that the answer is never going to be greater than 9 or less than 2. That should make any movement have more significance.
Life being difficult doesn't give one the right to cheat their way to make it easier.
You make a claim that [They do learn from much deeper low level structures in the domain they are exposed to] and yet what we see is not learning. All such systems are constrained by the programming that goes into them. As such, these systems may be able to generate data that is then stored, but this is not learning.

In addition you make the claim [They can be aware of implicit correlations and constraints that are totally outside what may be recognised in the scientific understanding] and again this is not awareness in any way. Is is still a result of the constraints of the programming that goes into them.

Being able to predict something is not learning nor is it awareness. Mathematical equations predict things that can occur and these are not aware nor are the equations learning. The programming that underlies these systems is mathematics and as such are just as constrained.

I have said this elsewhere, all such systems are Artificial Stupidity systems. It takes a human mind (which we still do not understand) to look at the results. To say that these systems are more than they are is missing the usefulness that can be obtained from them. Irrespective of any claims otherwise, all such systems are simple and are in reality GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) systems. To forget this is to walk a path that is dangerous.

I have, over decades, had to deal with systems that appeared to give the "right" or "reasonable" outputs and yet when analysed where found to be in great need of redevelopment or in some cases thrown away as pure garbage.

Computer systems are useful but don't depend on them without human checking and control.
What’s vile here?

The art looks unique, detailed, and dynamic.
Google has a billion users. Most of them don’t want the same things you want.
In terms of number of hours used daily, there is no context. Mobiles are the largest video game market, and the most used computing platforms. So, not quite all computing, but an awful lot of it.
To be clear, I agree with you on the mindless labeling of stuff that's in current music pedagogy at universities -- that's mainly out of Yale. With my students, we wrote Lieder.
Bikes are not a kind of car!
Yes, yes they are! Sorry if my error bothers you, but bikes are a type of car. Just look it up online.

LOL.
I make comics. I grew up reading stuff that used the space of a magazine spread in all kinds of clever ways, I fell in love with the way I can play with layout across a page. I made an entire graphic novel with multiple storylines running in parallel across every page.

A phone can show one or two panels at a time, at best. There’s a lot of stuff you just can’t do. It’s a tiny, limited canvas, even before it gets shitted up with ads and pop ups.
>We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts.

There are never certainties in anything except in hindsight. Most people with expertise who have reviewed SMR designs (and there are many) believe there's a high probability of the central manufacturing concept being able to work. Factories are a very well known concept at this point.
+1 for Codex, always enjoy perusing through there. McNally Jackson also hosts authors semi-frequently which is nice
Subtitle Fonts: Choosing the Right One
Station a police officer to direct traffic. To lead a procession. To hang out in a school zone. As a strong deterrence only. No intent to hand out tickets for minor infractions rather than literal crimes. Maybe also look for anyone on today's BOLO lists.

Or just, instead of traffic specific police, put them back on beat patrols where they walk around and interact with the community in positive, peace and order, encouraging ways.
AlphaFold is in part impressive because a team with no protein design experience solved a challenge which had eluded experts for decades.

It's absolutely a step change in demonstrating what's possible. The author can sit and criticize alpha fold from his armchair, but the dude is missing the forest for the trees.

Do you remember how people on HN used to take comfort that AI couldn't write code? Now they're taking comfort in the fact that AI can't write code well.

We're headed towards a word where data gets put in a blender to decide what to try next. That entire pipeline can and will be automated. And in that world, human ingenuity and expertise may become far, far less relevant.
wayback machine to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150513214912/http://theory.esm...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120218081940/http://theory.esm...
Disk Inventory X for MacOS is great.
https://www.derlien.com/
I've mostly seen JavaScript/NodeJS being used for Discord bots.

But as always with "Best language for X", it depends. You want to be able to build it as quickly as possible? Use the language you already know and that there is a SDK available for already. You want to learn as much as possible? Pick a language that you have zero experience with and that is as different as possible from what you already know (so don't learn C# if you already know Java, go for Common Lisp instead, as an example). Want to be able to run the project on embedded controllers? Then that would shape your choice as well.

In the end, it depends on so many things, that you should first make a list of what you want to achieve with your choice, then rank different languages based on how they fit in with those choices.
I think everyone needs a regular dose of motivation.

1. Motivational talks. They mostly appeal to your base emotions (greed, lust, pride, laziness, etc). So for a while, you feel motivated. But there's a point where you want it so bad but hate the process, leading to burnout. Treat it like junk food - a little is fine, but don't make it your main.

2. Fiction. The opposite of motivational talks. Motivators appeal to your conscious, fiction appeals to your subconscious. Comic books are the most efficient form IMO. Series, especially anime and Netflix, can be very inefficient. This is your bread and butter of motivation.

3. Watching people do good work. Code is hard, because people rarely record themselves in flow. Music (e.g. guitar, freestyle on Omegle videos) is very accessible. Also handwork - people fixing stuff, restoration, Mythbusters style edutainment-engineering. It motivates you seeing what skilled people can reach, but on the other hand, may make you give up.

4. Mentoring. My most motivated period was going through Sam Altman's startup classes [1]. There's very few truly good sources; most technical content today is plagiarized and a form of self-marketing. Lots of stuff on Udemy, etc, are just mediocre. But find yourself a good class or teacher, and you should also get a burst of motivation.

[1] https://startupclass.samaltman.com/