skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A year ago, traders were lucky if they read the economist Paul Krugman and understood his point about interest rates. He's written several times, over the last few years, that crypto has dynamics similar to gold, and gold gains value when real interest rates are low, but loses value when interest rates go high. So coming into this year, knowing the that Fed was about to raise rates, you could predict that both gold and crypto would have a bad year. Even if these various crypto exchanges had been perfectly managed, crypto still would have had a bad year.
Merry Christmas, HN
Just wanted to wish everybody here a Merry Christmas. HN is one of those Internet communities which I would be the saddest to see go, even looking back on other communities in which I've participated over the years.

I see many posts here about loneliness, nihilism, friendships (or lack thereof) and just wanted to let everybody here know that life is never hopeless, and there are always people who care, even if they're thousands of miles away.

Please reach out to loved ones this season and let them know you love them. Life is short, and you never know when the last time you'll be wishing somebody a Merry Christmas will be.

I wish you all the very best for 2023.
I recall this being annoying for me as an app developer trying to perfect the app icon. You upload the app icon as a square image, and Apple applies the round corners when they distribute it. I wanted to preview how it’d look on the App Store (back when every app submission would take weeks to get approved), but found the rounded corners from GIMP just didn’t match. At least they had stopped applying gloss effects by then which totally ruined the colors.
I have 5 "nice" watches now.

Each time I've tried to get a new Rolex has been just depressing. In an actual Rolex boutique I was basically told there is a waiting list and they wouldn't entertain adding me to it.

Another place I really struggled to get anyone to even talk to me, I finally went up to a sales assistant and told him I was interested in an Explorer 2. He told me that I couldn't get that watch, barely even looked up from his desk to acknowledge me.

Even in a store which I have a non-Rolex purchase history with I was told I could be put on a list of interest, but it's a very long and I'm at the bottom. I was told I might get a watch in 5 years or so.

Each time when I couldn't get a Rolex I've ended up buying something which I think is just as nice, probably even better mechanically and I was able to pick the watch, try it on, buy it and walk out that day. And actually be treated nicely by the shop staff. Brands like Zenith, Omega, IWC...

The place that took my details and added me to a presumably non existent list did hint that one way to move up the list was to spend more. e.g. it would help if I bought some unpopular version of the Datejust.

Now Rolex have their Certified Pre-Owned program. That's going to make it even harder to buy a new Rolex, now dealers will want you to buy n pre-owned watches to be considered for a new one.

Eventually this will bite Rolex in the ass. Eventually their existing customers will stop buying, who they going to sell to then ? Who have they not pissed off ?
Tiny Snippets of Code That Changed the World
Thomas largely does not recuse himself. Given his wife’s interests and work, this is troubling. Damn near any case involving Trump or the GOP establishment should have Thomas stepping aside.

The rest of the Justices appear to recuse themselves regularly and properly.
Yes, the person on our doorstep is 'lazy', 'dirty', threatening, etc. For that person, we call the police or have laws passed to criminalize them.
Ok, but what would you expect it to look like otherwise, if they could not actually learn those things because their brain was not wired to be able to?

They still are going to grow up, but unlike normal folks, they can’t learn those skills - or if they do, it takes vastly more effort.
Absolutely: create more public spaces for people to congregate without spending money.
I'll have to check my receipt next time from Purple Lotus. I'll pay cash if they want to charge me for a debit card. Seems like I'm doing them a favor so they shouldn't charge me.
You are of course correct -- the last democrat-nominated majority was during the Kennedy/Johnson era.

The greatest majority lately was 8:1 during Bush Sr.

The last democrat supermajority was during Roosevelt/Truman, when all 9 justices were democrat-nominated.

For anyone who's interested, here's a google doc I created that shows the tenure of the justices with the party of the president that nominated them, starting from the end of Truman. It's been on my to-do list to extend it back to the first justices. Maybe I'll take that as a weekend project.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TKXH_wb29XumUAEXPGCn...
> Number generation

Number generation is extremely important and it's also regulated. You don't put such a thing in the client obfuscated or not.
Their coin flip thought experiment is extremely misleading and it took me a while to understand why but now I think I can explain it.

Intuitively, it seems like everyone is making a fair bet because you're equally likely to win or lose. If you have an initial net worth of $1000 and flip a coin you're equally like to gain or lose $200 and your expected net worth after the flip is still $1000 (50% chance of $1200 or $800) so it's a wash, right? However their simulation kept having me end up poor which confused me, so I ran the same simulation in a Python script. What I found was as the number of flips increases your net worth approaches zero! I found this surprising because if the expected net worth after a single flip is unchanged, I would expect this to stay true for multiple flips. But based on simulations, against my intuition, it seems like this is actually a bad bet in the long term and you'll always lose money. This is still true even if you start to skew the odds and give them a 51% chance to win the coin flip.

So after some googling I found something called the Kelly Criterion which calculates whether a bet is good or bad based on the gains and losses and chance of each and decided to plug in these numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion#Proof

For the game in the article, the rules are that the poorer person bets 20% of their net worth on a coin flip, so these are the variables:

f=20%
p=50%
q=50%
a=20%
b=20%

r = (1 + f*b) ^ p * (1 – f*a) ^ q
= (1 + 0.2 * 0.2) ^ 0.5 * (1 – 0.2 * 0.2) ^ 0.5
= 0.99919967974

So the long term geometric return of playing this game is 0.999, and since it's slightly below 1 you will lose money in the long term. And the really misleading part is it seems like everyone is playing the same game, but what's really happening is the POORER person is playing this game (because the net worth value comes from them) and the rich person is just taking the inverse bet against them. In other words, this thought experiment is "force a poor person to play this gambling game with a geometric return below 1 (so on average they lose money), and pair them up with a rich person who gains money equal to the poor person's losses", which is obviously going to result in rich people being favored and gaining money.

If you forced a rich person to play this same game of repeatedly betting 20% of their money on a coin flip they would also end up losing all their money! When you frame it like this it's obvious that having a poor person play an unfavored gambling game and deposit their losses to a rich person is going to favor the rich people. This doesn't seem like a critique on capitalism or inequality, it's more analogous gambling at a casino.

----

However I am still confused how you can have a game where the expected gain after a single match is 0%, but when playing multiple rounds your expected gain is negative (this is what plugging numbers into the expected value formula in the Kelly Criterion wiki seems to prove). I find this counterintuitive and hoping someone can explain this.
Idk, Thunderbird, Outlook, and desktop email checkers in general seem absolutely antediluvian to me. Like CRT screens, trackball mice, and space cadet pinball.

Do you still have to fetch mail manually like a caveman or did they make it automatic yet? Does your mail sync between all your devices? I still think it's less likely to get banned from gmail than my local hdds to fail.
Off the top of my head Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind and Sunny Balwani must have been close. Epstein was also pretty close.

When I Google Billionaire arrested I get a flood of responses with names.

I would argue that at least individuals with 100 plus million have the similar capacity for flight AS billionaires. You could probably come up with an extensive list of US celebrities that have been arrested in this category
I tried out FastMail and ended up deciding to self-host because they would block legitimate email even though I added a contact as instructed to "whitelist" senders. Their support just said that the sender wasn't set up "correctly". They weren't necessary wrong but I don't care as a user, I want that email.

So I enjoy the fact that my self-hosted solution only rejects emails from blocked senders or DMARC rejects. At the very least everything else goes to spam so that I can see it.
Yep, we used to have taboo topics, but the overton window is massive these days.
I take a dim view of "approve more density or we'll sue you". That's more than nothing, sure, but it'll inevitably lead to less housing than just outright requiring various upzoning rules, as various cities do the minimum or even less and fight things in court.

Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them. I know the newer regulations have more teeth, but when you know the other party is hostile to helping people to begin with, it makes more sense to me to explicitly set all the rules up front.
Try https://jmp.chat . Nice features, excellent customer support.
> I actually can't imagine any other use for vh that isn't related to screenjacking

Creating fixed panels on the left or right side of the viewport that are full height and sticky.
Range impact of cold weather does seem to be a real thing, I can't speak personally because I own a Tesla which has some of the lowest impact.

Another thing to keep in mind is: Charging speeds of cold temps. While the Tesla seems to do great at range, charging at cold temps is not great. When it's below freezing, home charging can be tough to impossible. A few days ago (when it was merely "cold", before the huge cold snap hit us), I drove the car and then parked it to charge for the night. It charged at a rate of 1 mile per hour. Usually it'll hit 30-40. I have it set to start charging at midnight, which meant that the battery cooled down after driving for ~6 hours, before it started charging. I could have started charging as soon as I got home, but then I'm in the 3x higher electricity pricing... I could bump that up to 9 or 10pm to help.

This also impacts road trips. If you are traveling in freezing temps, definitely charge before checking into a hotel (unless the hotel has a charger, which is fairly rare), rather than in the morning. Instead of 30m charge time, it can take 60-120 minutes to charge at a Supercharge.
Who is left to do any actual programming in this model? Only the entry level? And who is to clean up their mistakes? Management?

You needn't have identified yourself as management, your myopia speaks for itself. My sympathy to your organization.
This is an interesting list. I'd add hashing and hash tables to the list. There are lots of interesting variations of these as well.

I would put hash tables ahead of piece tables because of their generality. For text editors I've always thought that gap buffers were so straightforward that ropes and piece tables seemed like extra unnecessary work. I see that VS Code uses piece tables so perhaps someone can explain the performance differences to me.

I've never sat down and benchmarked various implementations of text buffers. However, it seems to me that memmove(3) on modern processors would be so fast that moving a buffer gap on even a 1GB file wouldn't be perceptible, and in return operations over the whole buffer like string searching or parsing would be much more efficient in a gap buffer because the program could count on the buffer being in contiguous memory locations (after closing the gap). In buffers implemented using a part table or ropes, every character access involves extra layers of indirection. Furthermore, gap buffers are going to be more cache friendly for the way that most editing operations take place in a text editor.

Perhaps someone that has actually done some comparisons could enlighten me.
Feel free to delete my comment you replied to (with yours superseding it) as well as this one, and take the archive org link for your own comment if desired. Merry Christmas! Thank you!
Im having hard time coming up with a genius idea for your defense or counter attack.

I see only the long-term approach. If you’ll keep working and do us on what you can control, you’ll get the best you can get.

They cannot be controlled. So leave it aside, and work harder than you’d normally have to.

Positive reviews will come, and eventually (but maybe slowly) they’ll overcome the bad ones.

P.S: I’d love to get a copy. Email me with the release! @yuvalaizenman@gmail.com
Ask HN: Which project should I focus on?
There are 2 projects that seem very useful and something I really enjoy, but I'm not sure which one to pursue. I would like to get your opinion on it. To be totally honest and clear, I have no budget for either of those projects. I am willing to put my time into them and to be patient even if it takes years.

1. Gay adult project

I am gay and have pinpointed what bothers us in the gay community and what can be improved. It is a gay hookup site but with a significant major improvement. I think that could really improve the hookup scene in the gay community. I have no business model or way to monetize it at this moment. it is a location-based so kinda hard to market because I have to promote it city by city. I do have some adult followers on my Twitter and I started to write the blog. Here I know exactly who to target and who needs this service. Just not sure how to target those people, but I have some ideas.

2. Mainstream project

This is a mainstream project with a clear business model and earning plan. It is not location-based, everybody can jump in and participate. One side pays while the other side gets paid. Here I don't know how to target an audience, I have some ideas. This one is either "it goes viral or it doesn't". I don't really know if people need this or not, but I know that people want to earn money, while other people want to pay someone to do something or to see someone do something. This project is technically well-defined, but business-wise not so much, the purpose is not really clear for me.

If I may, I could share landing page of each project so you could get a better idea about what it is, my description here could be vague
I'm not here to talk about the features of each project or competitors, I'm here to get advice on which one I should pursue.
Meta - "write that down write that down!!"
This article appears to be a misleading write-up of the "California: Designing Freedom" exhibit, the central premise of which is that "California has pioneered tools of personal liberation, from LSD to surfboards and iPhones."

That being said, there is an actual causal relationship between LSD and HyperCard: "Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media."¹ — Bill Atkinson

For more, see the Mondo 2000 article, "The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard".²

¹ https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

² http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hype...
According to the published case study [1], the illness progressed over 4 months, so at the start of the "3 weeks" they had already diagnosed the infection and had isolates of the bacteria ready for testing.

The Texas institute had already been working on using phages to cure infections with the same bacteria in mice, and it sounds like they were in a position to start human trials. It's not like they invented the therapy on the spot.

So when the patients wife showed up, and took care of all the bureaucratic issues (like getting compassionate use authorization), they knew exactly what they had to do.

I think the story shows what a competent manager can achieve.

[1]: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AAC.00954-17
Woah, all different topics or what?
Interestingly, age of introduction is also important. For a long time the advice was to delay introducing allergens. It turns out that that increased the chance of being allergic to the thing.
Wow, I don't always agree with Cochrane, but I found myself nodding in agreement to everything in this OP. The passage about Stanford asking students to apply two weeks in advance to host parties (WTF?), with an advance list of attendees (WTF?), is shocking to me. The university's response is surreal. Quoting from the WSJ:

> Samuel Santos Jr., associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning within the Division of Student Affairs, says the school is working to address students’ concerns about Stanford’s social atmosphere. “The party-planning process will be streamlined and more administrators will be hired to help facilitate student social life.” “We want events to be fun, inclusive and safe and those things can happen,” Mr. Santos says. “They just require collaboration and honesty.”

I couldn't agree more with Cochrane that the real problem lies in the fact that Stanford's bureaucracy has gotten so bloated that it now has an apparatchik with the title of "associate vice provost of inclusion, community and integrative learning" (not a provost, not a vice provost, but an associate vice provost... WTF?), who promises that "the party-planning process will be streamlined" (WTF?) and that "more administrators will be hired" to do so (WTF?).
Looking at that, it doesn't seem like you can actually get Bitwarden from F-Droid? That looks like instructions to set up a third-party repository (hosted by Bitwarden)?

The page didn't mention anything about reproducible builds. (Doesn't mean they aren't using it though, but that would be internal.)
Weird. I know several undergrad and grad students now and recently graduated from Stanford and they are all really enjoying it and having fun. Literally every one of them.

I suspect that what is fun is different for different people.
I live just outside of Boulder Colorado. We just had a polar vortex like a huge chunk of the country did intents were 14 below zero fahrenheit.

My Tesla model 3 actually does very well although of course there is a range reduction. This is one of the areas where Tesla shines compared to other auto manufacturers because they have always viewed themselves as a battery company first. There's not really much you can do to beat years and years of data on BMS and various battery conditions. Tesla's are collecting and transmitting data on current temperature state of the battery etc all the time.

Things like fit and finish of body panels are something that the other manufacturers have decades of experience with in Tesla doesn't. But on batteries we are now talking about 10 years of data Tesla has that they don't. And the culture in the Detroit Auto industry isn't exactly a good one when it comes to promoting competent engineering management.
Why should I archive all my emails? Genuine question because I don't.
What a garbage study! n=28? Self reporting? Uncritical acceptance of user profile info and video content with no verification? No mechanism of causation?

Salient quote: "64.3% of subjects cited were selling merchandise on their TikTok account related to their TikTok tics or could be contacted for paid appearances."

It's trash. It's not science. In fact, it's offensively not science. What's next, reporting on the supernatural stuff that we see on video sites? By this standard, I find the top 20 or so people on TikTok that report ghost encounters and can get a paper published about how ghosts are real.

Snark aside, if this is the quality of material you are basing your assumption of "ill effects" on, I feel more comfortable in both calling TikTok no different from any other media sharing platform, and characterizing this handwringing about it as tired Luddite-ism, than I did before reading your link.
USV’s First Fund Closes
While I've always supported legalisation, I'm bummed that the US is following suit so fast.

Kind of worried about the following scenario: US legalise weed with next to no regulations on e.g advertising. US consumerism/advertising + social media + lack of widespread cultural norms = massive peak in usage short term. Anti-drug lobby uses this as "proof" that legalisation is wrong, convincing enough politicians to keep Europe in the dark ages for another 20 years.
https://archive.ph/B9VWu
Rick and Morty Window Closing Effect for Linux
thank you.
curiosity...?
It’s “tripping” as in drugs, not as in falling over something.

“The tripping Californians”

(I think the “the” makes it clearer)
Thanks for sharing the video. It's kinda telling seeing every single other car's auto-parking feature work flawlessly while Tesla's fails miserably