skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Peter Singer, one of the "founders" of effective altruism, argues pretty vehemently in his book "Effective Altruism" that the ends do NOT justify the means.

Even without such an argument, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a reason to do something in the real world, because there are no “ends” in the real world. Everything just keeps happening.
I didn't understand what was the point of the introduction with so many words like that.

Author describes functional programming zealots and seems to imply it's all annoying because of all the abstractions, then proceeds to do exactly that while calling it "the good parts".
Seems like a classic rule of headlines: If the headline is a question, the answer is most likely "no". If the answer was "yes", the headline would be a click-baiting statement ("We Are Prisoners of Geography!").
Maybe a key part of intelligence is merely knowing your own limitations.
I understood electronic differentiators and integrators long before we did calculus in high school and I've always had more of a practical than mathematical leaning with that sort of stuff.

I guess what you're saying here is that if I pass a square wave through a lowpass filter - reducing the amplitude of the harmonics and rounding off the corners - then the peak amplitude will stay pretty much constant until I pull the cutoff of the filter down sufficiently close to the fundamental that it starts getting attenuated too.

Makes sense I guess.
I don’t think it’s contempt.

If viewership stays the same then “they got used to it”
You commented the wrong article
Well there is people who would still invest in him with the condition of tighter control / regulation despite already losing money in this shitshow :-D. But it's probably just a crazy coping mechanism for being involved:

https://cryptopotato.com/despite-ftx-bankruptcy-kevin-oleary...
Is advertising fueling climate change?
That's interesting, but obviously, it's also a case where a plurality is implied. The speaker has a group of men in mind and doesn't know which of them she's talking about. There is an uncertainty involved, but it can't be about the sex of the person, as you note yourself.
In this case the emperor has no clothes, it really is fraud all the way down.

You might want to start reading Matt Levine’s excellent Bloomberg column, he has a knack for simplifying things. He also published an excellent primer on crypto.
We have some templates for gitlab issues at work, and it always bothered me that all the colons had a space before it. Both because it triggers the same annoying emoji feature, and also because it looks weird to me. Now it all makes sense: although the templates are in English, they have been authored by a French person, so the rule just bled into English writing.
I have heard that it was a victim of the 200 year famine that hit most parts of the world during 2000-1900 BCE timeframe. At the same time, the mega river that streamed through central India dried up completely adding insult to injury. This MAY be the cause of the collapse of civilization.

As far as I have seen, this is the best plausible explanation for the collapse - so far.
Sorry, you're incredibly wrong.

Go and talk to older musicians who always wore hearing protection, and then go and talk to musicians of the same age who never did. You'll see the effects very clearly.
There is a Danish scientist called Morten Münster who's done research on behavioural science. He's written a book for management that's gotten very popular in my country, and this is how I became acquainted with it back when I did a stint in management (which around here includes getting a MBA type education in management).

Aaaaaaaanyway, in it he talks about two ways of how we function as human beings, and I'm likely presenting this wrong, but one is basically the best practice theoretical mode of being and the other is how we operate at 17:00 on a Thursday after a week where both our children have been sick, and the overlaying message is that everything that isn't designed for the second mode of being is likely going to fail. Now the way it's presented in the research and the educational material, this has nothing to do with programming. It's more along the lines of companies needing to formulate missions and goals that aren't corporate bullshit, because nobody understands corporate bullshit when they are faced with an angry customer some late Thursday afternoon.

After a few decades in SWE, however, I've become sort of a fan of designing software for that 17:00 Thursday EnKopVand mindset, and functional programming helps a lot in that regard because it kills soooo many of the complexity pitfalls that you really don't want to deal with when you're tired, lazy and incompetent. Of course the other side of this is that I'm not religious about functional programming either, I rarely write classes these days, but if there is a good reason to write one, I will.
Or use literally any friendly distro? Fedora, PopOS, Ubuntu require the same amount of work to set up as a macbook. Just because arch takes time to set up (by design) doesn't mean all Linux distros are this needy.

Sure, for Fedora you have to add the Flathub repo (1 click on a website) and if you have a nvidia gpu, then you have to enable the RPMFusion repo (also 1 click on a website).

I'd argue installing Homebrew requires more effort.
Someone gets it https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/yvxz2l/kde_beats_macos...
Or offloading so you have more room for the useful stuff.
If you start with a program, see it as a block of logic that can be separated into parts with cuts in many different places. Choose the cuts so as to leave it a composition of functional programming abstractions. Then it is easy to reason about and it is possible to teach others to code in the same way. This is a benefit for functional programming - a promise of consistency in thought and style that is easy to debug.

The argument I read in this article seems to be going in that direction, but I'm not sure it is being presented clearly. The semi-monoid functors are a fair way down in the weeds and not really what people should focus on when deciding why functional programming is great. Unless they really like abstractions in which case more power to them.
Agree, especially with having as much part of the code as pure functions.

I think where functional programming really shines is in combination with a good type system, that can enforce those restrictions. In languages like js I find it not so useful (even if using map, filter, etc.) because I have no guarantees that there is a hack somewhere in the function that I did not see.

When there are a lot of pure functions the cognitive load is reduced so much I can use the "extra capacity" to focus on the task.
This comment seems overly contrarian to me.

Perhaps you can tell us what's wrong with his "ridiculous breadboard thing" rather than just stating that it's ridiculous?

About damage tracking and hardware encoding: The encoder must always diff the whole frame. There is no magic involved here. It probably does it intelligently, e.g. by hashing blocks and comparing the hashes rather than the memory regions. However, comparing the whole frame still means that you must read the entire frame from memory.

He is correct in saying that an encoder that is aware of damage regions would be more efficient. This is because it would require a lot less memory bandwidth.

He is also correct about 60 fps compositor updates. You probably just misinterpreted his meaning. What he's saying is that when there is nothing happening on screen, you shouldn't tell the compositor to keep updating the content because that just wastes energy on compositing something that hasn't changed.

However, this is tricky when you have a constant bandwidth h264 stream because you will have incremental updates for the same frame. A trick I've used to get past this is to stop encoding when the size of the encoded packages goes below a certain threshold, at which point the image isn't going to improve much.
Some of those things (investments) will give you the dollar back later, and might be considered better ideas on that basis.

But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.
Using the VIN number perhaps.
I knew that Zeihan would pop up before opening the article. Since the start of the 2022 Russian invasion, I've seen him and similar analysts rise in fame and it doesn't sit well with me.

It isn't the Stratfor origin, or the blazenly pro-American optimism per se that concern me. It is that these analyses feel like oversimplifications, to not say dumbing-downs -- talks of geographic predestinations. And they are taking some center stages in lobby circles.

I fear that they [these types of analyses], however enticing and conforting to a Western ear they may be, might obfuscate realities. Them monopolizing the ears of politicians and business leaders alike can only bite us back.
I'm also very much interested in finding solutions to the stated problem, but have not had much luck so far
Browser models are too small, unlikely they recognize accurately. They are more for simple predefined phrase.

You can probably try vosk-api on the desktop-grade machine. You need big models from https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models, they require like 8Gb to run but they are much more accurate.
Interesting article with an interesting writing style, I may pick up the book even if I suck at reading books!

I didn't start as a skeptic and really think functional programming looks beautiful and is very useful in preventing side effects. However, in most practical situations I've found over the years functional programming to be harder to understand and debug when stuff goes wrong.

In javascript in particular, functional programming is very nice but at the same time usually way more ineffecient so for many tasks I tend to go back to normal for loops just because it's that much faster.

I had a collegue that wrote a lot of functional code and his code was extremely hard to follow and understand. Even if it was beautiful figuring out where the system went was the hard part and I had to go to the function decleration, understand it, move on to the next until I found whatever the issue was. When I found the issue, I couldn't easily fix it because the next function called was expecting the data structure to behave in a specific way so for one issue once I had to change basically every function called before and after which was way more tedious then if it would have been more sequential.

I don't know. There is something to say about functional programming but lately I have kind of tilted back into the more standard approach. Functional programming is a lot more beautiful in practically every implementation I've seen but the standard approach is, in my experience, usually more useful in practical terms.
Important part in towards the end..

While their research did not explore the causes of this drop in sperm counts, the authors say it reflects "a global crisis related to our modern environment and lifestyle," and they point to the disrupting role of chemicals on our hormonal and reproductive systems.
What if we had a world where digital books were just .txt files? E-book readers can format the book with any font, margins, or layout they want, but the book itself is just a plain text file. Is such a world possible?

I believe that simple text files can bring books to life regardless of the technology used. Even if all e-readers are gone, you can still use Vim or Notepad to read books. Even if the editor went away, I could code a small editor to convert the bytes in the file to characters on the screen.
It is not ready for daily driving (yet).

To save your time. That is the answer.
As clearly stated on the front page, you can install it on your own server if you want to.

This is open source, and they even provide a ready-to-run Docker image.
The nice thing about functional programming is that it allows you to shift some of the "mundane" domain thinking onto the type system. A classical example of that might be to mix units in physics code. So, nonsenses like adding up lengths and time is no longer possible.

Things also generally compose together more easily than in OO. There's other benefits too, but these are my main ones.

So, once you set up this invariant groundwork, you free your mind from thinking about certain problems, as the compiler catches them for you.

This isn't to say these things can't be done in OO (they have been done), but they're usually not enforced to the same level, as it's normally a library, not native functionality
That's because the US has free speech while in China there are laws about what can be posted online. If you don't want to see that content on TikTok, ask your politicians to pass censorship laws to ban it. Doesn't sound that good now does it?
Is there an accepted unambiguous definition of "existential" here?

Is it:

1. All life on the planet dies

2. All advanced life on the planet dies?

3. All humans die?

4. Advanced civilization is destroyed irretrievably?

5. Advanced civilization is destroyed for a long period of time?

etc

And I'm not sure the group "people who know anything about climate change" are neccesarily better equipped to answer this question - it's a complex systems question.

I'm not actually sure who is equipped to answer it accurately.
Two points: Firstly, the article has zero example of the "native knowledge" in question. Secondly, the Maori are not indigenous to New Zealand, arriving a scant couple centuries before Europeans, and had done tremendous damage to the native environment by the time Europeans got there.
Can confirm. I took Advanced Functional Programming for my master's. Of the ~15 people who took the class, the majority scored <=65% or gave up, a few people got pretty good grades because they were reasonably intelligent and willing to put in the work (me), and then there were a few people who scored >=95% because the high levels of abstraction genuinely made things easier for them.

That was when I learned that for some people, a monad really just is a monoid in the category of endofunctors.
When people call themselves "lazy and incompetent" they're not sincere. It's the equivalent of an obviously fit person saying "oh I'm so fat".

It's just fake humility. The same people would get offended if you actually suggested they were lazy and incompetent.
"Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" sounds like what a cult would say :)

Sure sounds like a cult in practice, especially in the whole context ( https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... the other 6 parts of the series are great reading too).
It's supposed to look like an old typewriter with partly broken types, but it looks like they overdid it on the "K"... plus no typewriter I know of can write with light color on a dark background, so that kind of breaks the illusion.
Being usable out of the box?

With KDE I don't need to go find a 3rd party app for decent window snapping, I don't need a 3rd party app to put files on my Android phone over USB, I don't need a 3rd party app to have the trackpad and scroll wheel mouse directions be "natural" and "unnatural" at the same time, I don't need a 3rd party app to be able to use the volume buttons to change the volume level of a sound device connected by HDMI or Display port, I don't need a 3rd party package manager to get the software I actually want to use, I don't need to give my terminal permission to display my fucking documents folder, I don't need to give every 3rd app I install special accessibility privileges to be able to it's damn job, I don't need to do things like manually copy over my R binary so I can use a debugger attached to it, etc.
show us the "other structures"

“Left as an exercise to the reader”. Reminds me those well-known tutorials with todo lists and other trivial nonsense, because a fully-fledged example would seed doubt of selling points instantly.

Sometimes I think that our area is one big IKEA store. You look at nice pictures, buy into the crap, and still feel okay because you’ve built most of it yourself. Not getting that this built-yourself part makes you relate to it much more than the initial advertisement or the practical value.
Not sure what you mean to imply. I've been using Mac daily at work for three years now, and KDE simply is better. I still prefer Mac over Windows though.

Similarly to the article author, a lot of my grievances are about Finder. Either it is very poor as a file manager, or it's so undiscoverable that after all these years I have still not figured it out properly.

These are all anecdotes and preferences, obviously. I do get that Mac hits all the boxes for some people.
>If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent.

This is Pascal's wager level absurdity combined with Drake equation level accuracy...
> with cloud gaming

This is merely premature. We'll eventually get GPUs at the edge to serve urban customers on a wide variety of devices.

I'm not a fan of subscription gaming, but companies will want to do this for their entire back catalogs.

> GPU mining in sharp decline, that seems to be unlikely to happen soon. the GPU market recovering.

Just in time for all the AI/ML startups!
One is whether it's bad to eg. take first world Professional software developers' money and use it to stop hundreds of thousands of people dying of preventable diseases in developing countries. Personally, I think not really, or at least it'd be an odd thing to be upset about?
That’s just a common disagreement then, about priorities and decisions made on uncertain information.

No one gets to do a double-blind study on the measured probability of catastrophic AI accidents in worlds with and without safety research in advance of capabilities gain.
At least you didn't get the endofunctor explanation.
Non-profits are very different to corporate environments. Not without their own issues and bullshit, and less well-paid, but considerably more easy going and potentialy a lot more fun.

Some people like the idea of doing something meaningful, I've been in the sector too long to care about that. What I do find is that the sort of problems you're facing are far more interesting. For example, I spend all day trying to figure out how best to track how [ISSUE] is presented in the media.

Worth having a poke around non-profit job boards for interesting-looking problems. The good gigs are often solving very specific, weird and interesting challenges.
Advertisers are cancer, episode 3850.
> Billboards should be just wiped out, there isn't any real utility from them, and for the most part they just make things very ugly.

When traveling interstates across the U.S. they’re valuable, because they let you know what you didn’t think to search for online to visit along the way.

(Plus obviously searching for places to visit while driving is dangerous, or merely seriously inconvenient if you have to frequently stop to conduct said searches.)

I’m a fan of old-fashioned billboards on the interstate in rural areas where local orchards/attractions/restaurants need to get the word out. I just don’t want digital billboards blinding me at night.
This is a good question that I'd like to see answered in an experiment over the next couple of years.
Its errancy isn't overly clear.
For anyone happening to get here after a while; it's most likely that the missile wasn't russian, but that those were remnants of an Ukrainian defense system.
Yes! Also https://uther.wtf/blog/the-life-changing-magic-of-refactorin...
Extropia's Children, Chapter 1: The Wunderkid
Isn't the staging area just a stack of changes where stack height == 1?
The first code iteration in this article could have been deployed to Production before I finished reading the rest of the article.

Functional programming definitely has its use cases, as side effects can introduce bugs. Unfortunately real world business logics often does require side effects. Often you only find out about side effects later in a project, and then you suddenly need to start hacking your clean functional approach.
>Concepts like "objective, rational linear thinking" are not anything to do with "whiteness" and to even suggest it is, is really quite profoundly insulting to everyone who isn't white.

Yes. As I spent several short paragraphs saying exactly just that, and in agreement with that premise. "The constructs of white culture" to which I referred do not refer to the specific items of that list, which I explicitly disclaimed and criticized in my comment.

I probably should have been more specific, precise and exact in my wording and not assumed that people would have put forth more than the minimum effort for a comment that goes against the HN zeitgeist, but I suspect I could have posted an entire essay and no one here would have bothered to actually read all the words. Mea culpa.
Reading from Deliveroo's press release [0] does this mean driver's who delivered on Tuesday and Wednesday have the monies owing to them under the administrator's control and are now unsecured creditors?

If so, I'm guessing they won't see much of, if any, of it?

[0] https://riders.deliveroo.com.au/en/news/20221116
> Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. Even without publisher/legal issues it's clear that preservation of digital media for even the next 10 years, and especially for the next 100 or 1000, is at risk.

If you dispense with the notion that publishers control that data, it actually becomes incredibly easy to achieve all of this and more. Worried about data loss? Make more digital copies, spread them on more media. Worried about shifting formats? Convert to plaintext, mobi, ePub or PDF - those will be supported in open source software indefinitely. Still worried about files trapped in proprietary formats that you don’t know how to convert? Fire up a VM.

As long as you can get files from under online DRM, the files are safer than ever.
I would rather inherit someone's stateful JavaScript or Java than a complicated codebase by a seasoned Clojure, Haskell, Scala developer.

I stand a better chance understanding the sequential code than a complicated recursive (edit: nested) monad. Depending how it was written.

I can probably understand Kafka pipeline's or a functional map, reduce pipeline.

My parser for my programming language which I'm building is a recursive Pratt parser but it's written in Java.

I want to understand functional programming better. I am interested in software transactional memory and parallelism. I am aware Erlang and Go use message passing but only Erlang is functional.

In theory functional code can be parallelised due to immutability but you need some kind of communication to indicate transference of values. Imagine a pipeline where you need to share a value to a few other threads. I'm aware Haskell has software transactional memory
In Javascript Object.freeze() and Object.seal() are wonderful to prevent accidental mutation.
GPS does not account for leap seconds (2002)
How is the for-loop any better than good ol' GOTO?
That is no longer the view of even David Reich.

Lets not conflate what is a fact and what is a theory. Aryans came in 2000 years later is not a fact but a theory and there are multiple holes in that theory. So, lets not flaunt that dubious theory when its not even substantiated with proofs.
The whole thing reminds me of "I, Robot", when the AI realizes that the greater good for humanity can't care for themselves, it is to be ruled by the AI for good.

This is the kind of vibe I get from this writeup, and the level of separation from humanity these people operate.
Is this the next wave of NFT scams?

Promise something that will never be build but in the mean time sell some NFTs and metaverse stuff?
Yeah the title is misleading, I clicked on it assuming some monumental discovery had been made that I missed being a huge fan of GOFAI.