skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1984 (bear with me), the protagonist has a feeling that things were better before, but can't tell for sure because the past was erased. He stumbles upon artefacts that were not destroyed, and that confirms he's not mad.

I have this vague feeling that the web got worse, but it's hard to tell just how much worse. I rediscovered i.reddit.com this month, and it's one of those artefacts.

Compare this to old.reddit.com, then to reddit.com, then to reddit.com without an ad blocker. Multiply that by the entire internet, and the loss is staggering.
What do you replace them with? Lots of businesses depend on them.

How much does anyone care? Most people freely give much more intimate information to other companies.

How much will those billion dollar companies spend to survive?
Because in lending you need to rely on a data source to provide information about repayment behaviour, sanctions, fraud flags, outstanding loan volumes, historical loan volumes, etc in a neutral, reliable, verified, and consistent manner.

While in theory it's possible to calculate a credit score, the complexity of the reports these companies provide go much deeper.

Further, these companies operate across jurisdictions allowing for cross-border activities and economies of scale for MNC's.
I ended up going down the rabbit hole looking into this practice and discovered companies exist advertising the ability to get any US citizens employment/compensation history for a nominal fee. An example of one such company: https://www.truework.com/
> The only way to kill this, apart from government intervention (which has no chance of happening in the US) is to let the “free market” do it by rejecting jobs that leak your information to Equifax (and letting them know why).

This will _only_ change through government intervention. The “free market” won’t solve this.
Agreed. The pain is just getting started. Hopefully we come out of it stronger.
The same credit reporting agencies exist for corporations, too: S&P Global ratings and Moody’s
Life is cruel, get over it.

This is an idiotic comment, but well, here it is.
You should also get your employer to not send your payroll data to Equifax. Opting out of Work Number only shuts off one way Equifax sells this information. They also collect the address on payroll and sell that database to law enforcement and skip tracers. You cannot opt out of that, to the best of my knowledge.
From what I can tell people in the US were not happy about cities in Britain getting bombed, France being conquered, etc.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in contemporary American understanding of WWII.
So, not for everyone, especially when you have to manage your own binary.

No one can feel 0.01s faster load time and there will be a dozen more things to tune in your app than shave that tiny bit off.
The idea of government doing this is laughable.

Not on principle, but on reality. They’d be slow to get started, and change would take forever (short of legislation).

These companies exist to serve legitimate needs in the various industries they serve (as yuck as that statement may be) and have hundreds of years of experience judging people.

Yeah it sucks, but what’s the solution? Rely on people’s “feelings” about other people?

You’d bring back community bank managers in a heartbeat if you did that!
FWIW, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ .
That’s on Reddit. They just don’t acknowledge other apps exist.
I bet they all know that none of them are among the biggest carbon-burners.
I prefer the alternative: let's put an end to misusing these "most private data". Stop using them as secret keys that you should never share with anyone (except that you are also routinely asked to share your SSN on paper, over fax, through random company portals, and if it ever gets leaked it's your problem.

Let's stop using identification keys as authorization keys.
It's not your data. It's the Banks data about you.

Do you have private notes about people you've met? Same thing happens with banks. Banks keep notes on how much you repay loans, how many loans you have, etc. Etc.

And the fact is, this data is very reliable. Prime Mortgages are paid back reliably. Subprime mortgages are not.

--------

If you are on the other side of the trade: deciding on which MBS to buy to secure your retirement income off of, you will be relying upon these statistics to keep your money safe.
I think something like the FICO system is probably necessary in an economy that runs on unsecured credit. If the government ran it they'd just outsource it to the same kind of contractors who built the original broken healhcare.gov and the result would be even worse than what we have now.

The rest of it like WorkNumber and TLO is really bad but it's exactly what you get in a neoliberal economy with very little privacy protection.
Tw current threats to the foodweb in the ocean are microplastics and wastewater release from Fukushima nuclear reactor area.
Nikola founder Trevor Milton convicted on three charges of fraud
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)

It's many volumes but I never considered not finishing.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841)

Reading that helped me understand the NFT craze and how these things get going and usually end
> What is it like to have a brain?

I wouldn't even know
OpenAPI, tests, and {Ruby on Rails w/ Script.aculo.us built-in back in the day, JS, and rewrite in {Rust, Go,}}? There's dokku-scheduler-kubernetes; and Gitea, a fork of Gogs, which is a github clone in Go; but Gitea doesn't do inbound email to Issues, Service Desk Issues, or (Drone,) CI with deploy to k8s revid.staging and production DNS domains w/ Ingress.
thought the news would be of interest. that's all
Oh, that’s fair and you’re right, they did care about those kinds of atrocities.

Edit because I’m exhausted and not being mindful about finishing thoughts, I didn’t mean this to be fighting words so much as clarifying words: they cared about mass attacks on civilians in some cases but not others. Bombings of allied cities was absolutely a concern. Mass murder or German and mostly eastern European Jews wasn’t such a concern. There wasn’t any such reaction to sending Jewish refugees back to be murdered.

The whole concept of actually caring about nazi atrocities on the scale they they committed them, to the victims they were committed against, was a retroactive set of moral concerns. And that’s unsurprising given that the US was the primary inspiration for those atrocities.
Pair programming is a great way to learn. Just watch what others do and pick up tricks.

Also, check out fugitive by tim pope. It’s a git plugin for vim that’s changed my life. It’ll open your files with the old version in one split and the new version in another. You can then pull in changes chunk by chunk. It’s amazing.
I thought you were going to say Starfish by Watts, which also features smart gels.
It’s actually quite amazing that we got the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It has real teeth. The only similar thing in the last 15 years was Dodd Frank and the CFPB. Something like the FCRA for privacy would be amazing.
I can agree with you. I also disagree with much of what they wrote (although I did not count how much), but I believe that anyone should have freedom of speech whether it is agree or not.

But, most of that is not important for the software, since the computer programs can be judged by their own merits instead of everything else that the author does (especially if they are public domain).
Welcome to the field of QA automation
Freedom of association is a freedom many (most?) people like and practice all the time, by peacefully self-sorting (interests, beliefs, consumption choices, moving to new place). "The Big Sort" etc.

Though it does seem almost schizophrenic that everyone preaches the opposite as the highest virtue, while doing it.

Some groups and even countries do it more than others.
Renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. Nuclear is capex dominated, you want to run your nuclear plants at 100% capacity to make a profit. So if you want to mix them with non-dispatchable power like renewables you either have enough nuclear plants to cover 100% of demand (for times when there is no wind and no sun) and make a loss on them most of the time, or you don't and get blackouts.

Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.
Would you please keep flamewar rhetoric off HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

We've had to ask you this repeatedly. That's not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Subsidizing tuition is nothing new, loans and grants have been around for decades and yeah those (especially the private loans) drove up tuition mercilessly. Neither side should be ignored here – just because there are structural problems does not mean that we should shy away from lifting the sceptre of debt. We need to address both problems.
> I like collecting the data about my local areas, if big tech and the government can why can't I?

According to another commenter, Wigle project sold their data to Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33210603

Also: because you're helping private and public investigators help track others?

And providing a log of everywhere you've been? Your "stumble" log is a breadcrumb trail.

I don't get the point of these services or participation in them.

Does Wigle offer any sort of protections for the people collecting data?
The idea that these companies escape scrutiny because of a $1k donation is truly silly. Think harder about this.

The $1k is just an understanding that says "we provide a somewhat unsavory but necessary service to the country (with pretty shitty service to boot) -- it might not be hard for you to kill us (we're not popular and could easily be scapegoated for any number of crimes) but unless you replace us with something better in the process you will risk creating chaos and then voters will toss you out".
You sound like a sales pitch but my NeoVIM based off of AstroNvim breaks in very random ways across a dozen of servers even under same configuration, I'm about to try Helix instead of the ecosystem with pile of random quality plugins.

It looks promising at first with LSP and all that but I don't know when I had any stable moments.
Genuinely curious: what’s the problem with installing the app? I generally get good value out of Reddit, so didn’t mind installing the app and it works ok, have been using it for years and I find the push notifications (with the phone permanently in do not disturb) useful as well.
Ridiculous claim. What are the assumptions?
I don’t, I want batteries to not pay PGE a shit ton of money. I’ve looked at prices, it’s just not happening.
Every single person I know on any sort of mental health medication also had therapy before and after being prescribed it. Therapy does help, especially when your illness requires you to learn how to cope with your condition (and the fact that things are just harder for you for no good reason).

Two people very close to me are fucked without medication. My wife was anxious to the point of having regular panic attacks, which caused exhaustion and spirals of depression, and her fear of panic attacks was so great that it caused more of them, and made her want to die. With medication, she simply doesn't have them anymore.

My brother is bipolar and has to take lithium (and maybe something else) to stay normal. We've had a couple of emergencies where he's run out of medication or tried to ween off of it (once at the suggestion of his psychiatrist, the fucking idiot), and things deteriorate quickly, going from doing incredibly well to being so paranoid at work he can barely hold it together.

Not really sure how their personalities could cause these problems? Even if they are personality defects in some way, those aspects of their personalities must be suppressed or they simply will not function and would probably ultimately be miserable until they just killed themselves. It isn't necessarily a helpful insight to learn that a disease if part of _you_.

Regardless, I just don't think it makes any sense to ascribe these problems to personality, and the tendency to do so in the past led to many people being denied medication that could actually help them.
Where it says “a while?” This has the distinctive ring of Kentucky windage to me, are there any actual studies on how long it would take to do this? What’s the shape of the curve? If it’s a while on a logarithmic curve that’s very different than if it’s linear or exponential.

The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
Lucky for Sweden then that they already are?
See you in 2117 :)
These behemoths are a major vertebrae in the backbone of the US economy. Without Equifax, Transunion, Experian and Dun & Bradstreet a huge portion of economic activity would come to a grinding halt. The vast majority of sales of housing, cars, computers, phones, hot tubs, etc. are all reliant on on-demand credit scoring. We have made serious strides in regulating them, but disbanding them would be a financial disaster. Regulation has actually made the problem a bit worse since it has essentially turned the credit reporting industry into an oligopoly, further centralizing consumer data collection so attackers only have to hit a single target to get almost everything.
So far zero people have given a source showing that the claim of powering 91,000 homes is an outrageous lie. Zero sources is "not close at all" to showing that the actual output is going to be so wildly different from what every source says will be the actual, not theoretical, output.
Right. vim (and the likes) are only good for server side config editing but these days remote plugin of vs code can also take that role away.
You need to have database expertise if you want to operate a database at any significant scale. All of those configuration parameters don’t go away just because you’re not asked by the software to configure them. There are a lot of use cases out there where a more simple product would be most suitable, but I’ve seen plenty of instances of choosing a more simple tool and then one by one encountering every single problem that a more sophisticated RDBMs would be capable of easily solving.

Also, I really like Postgres, but it’s a nightmare to work with at scale. Even simply things like execution plan monitoring and management are tedious in Postgres, but incredibly easy to stay on top of with the _tooling_ provided by Oracle.
Depends on the package manager. Some package managers support overlays so you can keep your package modifications as a layer on top of the base package.

I know you can using Nix for sure. I think Arch/pacman (Arch Build System) and Gentoo/portage (since it is source-based) also have this concept, but I’ve never used it. No clue about other package managers.

The downside is that package updates will require a recompilation, but you can use binary caches to centralise this slightly.
All qualia (which consciousness itself closes over) are impossible to rigorously define with words. Attempts to do so will come across as woo.

What we can do however is experience qualia first-hand, and prove to ourselves that they exist. While we may never know if we're experiencing them the same way as each other, the fact that we can experience qualia at all is undeniable, and the question of why we can do so is the real question being asked here.
This is my eternal complaint. Like a fish not noticing water, people don't mention it because it is a given. I'm not even sure how many people are conscious of being conscious.
Gosh, that study. It was the first time my faith in academia was severely shaken. As a 19yo, I spent around 6 hours reverse engineering what was going on, and then fell into a spiral of “Is this what academia is all about? Really?” Because I was so fascinated by the concept, then it was such a letdown…

It took some time to appreciate that there are some worthwhile ideas in that paper. But it was my first experience with “Academic lies about accomplishment to secure further funding.”

It’s hard to say whether “lie” or “severely exaggerate” is appropriate.

A method existed to measure a signal from a neuron. A second method existed to modify that signal. Whenever the plane crashed, the signal was modified slightly, until the plane flew level.

It didn’t learn to fly. The researcher modified a neuron (steady signal) until it gave the appropriate signal (e.g. zero) to fly level.

Negative signal, plane banks left. Positive signal, plane banks right. If plane crashes, modify neuron until signal is neither positive nor negative. That was the extent of the study.

In that context, do you feel like the neurons learned to fly? Maybe. It’s certainly similar in spirit to reinforcement learning in modern times. But I wouldn’t say that setting a signal to zero is a nice definition of “flew a plane”.

In other words, there was no active feedback; if you pointed the plane in a slightly different direction, it would immediately crash. It wasn’t doing anything more than setting the signal slowly over time to an answer that was known ahead of time. (Keep the plane level by not moving the controls.)

Suppose the neurons learned to draw a straight line. That was essentially what was being demonstrated here. If you substitute “plane crash” with “line becomes a curve”, it becomes much less exciting, to say the least.

“Isn’t that just learning to set a signal to a constant value?” “Yep” “Will it always become the same constant?” “Yep” “Can’t we already do that?” “Yep”

I was so disillusioned that it took many years to stop believing that academia itself was at fault for misinforming the public so badly. After all, it’s almost two decades later, and people still believe “rat brain flies plane” happened in 2004.

If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself not to worry about it; focus on the academics that are working quietly on the frontier, not the ones trying to raise funding for their lab.

At least the neurons in today’s study actually learned to play something. But if the past is any indication, I’d err on the side of skepticism.
It supposed to be the the moon.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2020/12/23/tesla-to-th...
We use both Algolia and postgres FTS. While tsvector and GIN indices are fast, there’s a couple of downsides if you are looking for prefix based search on every key stroke.

1) It’s based on tokenizing input, and ‘english’ config will tokenize it in unexpected ways. We had people’s name being tokenized like “eddie” to “eddi” and searching for “eddie:*” doesn’t work. Even the ‘simple’ config will tokenize it undesirably. I couldn’t find the exact config to turn it off.

2) you can index multiple columns by concat strings, but when results come back, no easy way of knowing which fields matched where to highlight the search.

3) Typo tolerance isn’t there. You have to send possible typos with OR in query. Typesense achieves this with ART index where it’s very cheap to explore more paths of a trie.

4) it’s fast, but not get results on every keystroke fast. Prefix based searching is still fairly expensive compared to token based search.

Postgres FTS is good usecase if you want to search for whole words in large document.

Typesense is nice, but I wish they built an auto-sync with postgres so one doesn’t have to deal with ETL headache.
CRAs maintain consumer credit scores which support consumer borrowing and lending - a large part of the US financial system. Experian could have (and perhaps should have) been disbanded after their data breach, but if you disband the category, who or what replaces it to track consumer creditworthiness?

Beyond credit scores, there's been a proliferation of "Know Your Customer" (KYC) requirements to reduce fraud and money laundering. The most common form of KYC is called "Knowledge Based Authentication" (KBA). This is when they ask you a series of multiple choice questions about previous addresses, schools, and employers. You usually have to get 4 out of 5 right to "pass". I paid cash for a new car from a Jeep dealership - before they'd complete the transaction, I had to pass KBA from Experian. I believe it was a state law that imposed the requirement.

I don't think it's practical to argue for the extinction of CRAs as a category. I do think it's practical to give consumers more control over their data - what is stored and where it goes. I've been tinkering on solutions for this, as have quite a few others in the data privacy community as well.
Because it works perfectly fine in the browser? Because I don’t want all the notifications and OS integration an app brings for a simple website? Because I know they are using the app to further track me and steal more of my time? Because I choose not to.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and flamewar comments and ignoring our requests to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32902774 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30016351 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833297 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213045 (Nov 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19354803 (March 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086334 (Feb 2019)
The response that always comes up is “at 9am” in a TZ with DST, Doesn’t work with UTC
A Tiny British Publisher Became the Home of Nobel Laureates
But that’s not capital outflow. That’s exporting useless cheap goods for an inflow of capital (USD).
Yep, I definitely agree that the 6B and below models are worse than Copilot. The 16B ones are pretty good! But IMO still undertrained compared to Copilot, and of course much less accessible (though see elsewhere in this comment section; I think INT8 and even INT4 should be doable – this won't help much with inference latency but it should help most people fit the 16B model locally).

I have high hopes for the BigCode project too; they will get to take advantage of a lot of things that have been learned about how to train code models effectively.

One last note – I think that many of the improvements to Copilot since its release are attributable to "prompt engineering" and client-side smarts about what context should be included; I'm not certain, but I can believe the underlying Codex model used hasn't changed much (if at all) since code-davinci-002.
My point is pretty simple: It was not an American war, America was not a major party to the horrors of the war (except as a perpetrator of nuclear attacks on civilians), and an article purporting to describe the real visceral combat traumas of world war 2 would include descriptions from forces of countries that lost millions in the war. The piece only makes sense, and is only interesting, in the context of a fantasy world in which US forces played a much more decisive and heroic role than they did. It’s jingoism.
This is a small amount of student loan forgiveness for people making less than $125k. Hardly the bourgeoisie.
The "free market" created this
My point is that the Chinese establishment does not actually want this. It’s the private citizens trying to sneak the money out.