skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this boils down to three concerns. One, that if you can't accept any risk for the crew then you have to do an insane amount of basically non-transferable R&D before going to Mars. Two, you can get more research per dollar from robotic probes instead. And three, you'll contaminate Mars.

One, yes, there will be a lot of risk involved and it is infeasible to mitigate it all in our lifetimes. If we want to go to Mars in our lifetimes, we will need to accept more risk than possibly any manned space mission before. But would it be more risk than faced by, for example, sea explorers hundreds of years ago? Exploration has always been risky. I think it will be sad if we wait hundreds of years to mitigate every possible risk before trying to set foot on Mars. I think there are people out there willing to take on a relatively high level of risk; why deny them the opportunity?

Two, sure, you might have better "ROI" on research using robotic space probes, but be careful with that argument, because if you think about it any further you'll realize that you'll get even better ROI not exploring the solar system at all. If your goal is research for practical purposes then there's plenty of that to do here on and around Earth. If your goal is research for research's sake, then I submit that that's not inherently more virtuous than a goal of human space exploration. I personally prefer the latter and I think the public agrees. And if your goal is research to enable eventually sending humans out there, then we'll learn a whole lot more and faster by actually sending humans as soon as it is remotely feasible.

Three, contamination is inevitable unless you plan to make Mars off limits forever. And if by some chance there is actually life on Mars to contaminate, then I bet there's life elsewhere in the solar system to discover too. I doubt very much that Mars would be our singular chance in the solar system to investigate uncontaminated extraterrestrial life. Also, natural processes have likely already landed bits of Earth on Mars as meteorites, just as bits of Mars have fallen to Earth. If your thesis is that extremophile bacteria that we don't even know about are omnipresent on Earth and could survive on Mars, then they could certainly have contaminated Mars already. And if they did, millions of years of evolution would certainly enable them to outcompete anything we would accidentally introduce from Earth.
On the other hand, I'm curious how the delta-V numbers hold up for landing on the Moon, where aero-braking is impossible. Launch and landing require by far the most delta-V between either of the two bodies, much more than the difference between lunar transfer orbit and Martian transfer.
I think this whole argument boils down to "people need to be inspired to do something great". Settling Antarctica isn't as inspiring as colonizing Mars.

But in my estimation, colonizing Mars would run out of steam really quickly. Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring. There isn't that much geological diversity, and there's no life. You wouldn't want to take a vacation there. I know there's going to be a lot of people here who are going to say "No! Mars is really cool!" The people here aren't normal. Living in a cave underground without being able to go outside and see the sun or take a walk is a nightmare for most people.

Landing on Mars could inspire lots of people. But once it's done, its mystique is just going to wear off. People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
I had to see it. Thanks for sharing.
> how do you respond if they ask for proof that nobody has fallen off the edge of the earth?

The same way you should respond to all questions. Truthfully. You have no proof, and you don't care to waste your time looking for it. If that is a showstopper for the conversation, it was never worth having in the first place. Simple as that.
Your first point, I'm not sure that is true.
If you are using a functional style in a language that supports side effects, its still pretty easy to debug. you could implement a tap function that console logs the value, then then returns the result of the previous function in the composition/chain.

If you are using a lazy evaluated language like Haskell, instead of the stack trace you're used to in an imperative programing language, you'd get the reductions that led up to the reduction of the expression with the breakpoint on it.

The second point, However, I do agree with, especially in languages where mutability is the default.
Connections Museum: Telephone Technology
What... paper money and gold bars are non-fungible now?
That being said, sometimes a good abstraction can really simplify a complex problem by dividing it up to a set of smaller sub-problems. In such cases, the abstraction is worth it even if there is no reuse. As always, rules like this have to be interpreted in a context.
Ah, I'm jealous! Cheers mate. :)
You can always propose homework that the AI cannot do (yet)
Mnemonicizer, the Mnemonic Device Device
as a large truck mechanic i can say theyre okay and degrade roads casually because operators suck at learning how to use them.. in real winters like Alberta the drivewheel is either frozen to the motorized arm all the time, or glides like a ballerina against a wall of ice from the tire. this is a solution for a problem of casual issue, like climate change in the south usa perhaps :)
The problem with your argument isn't lack of rationality, it's that it signals a lack of faith (destructive narrative). As others have mentioned, you can't "kill Mars" because who is going to be the hero then? You have to replace the idea of Mars with a better one, which allows for a constructive narrative in people's minds. BTW, that's essential in any constructive criticism of anything really. Simply saying "it's bad" isn't sufficient if you actually want people to think about alternatives - you have to present a better constructive narrative that could be accepted as "even cooler" by believers. I fully agree with almost everything you write in the article btw - IMO Pheobe, Titan, or Ceres could be a viable long-term goal for colonization after the moon. I'm sure there are many others, but we need to actively talk about and analyze these to identify the best option.
There are an estimated 10^22 to 10^24 stars, or in the many sextillions range. So really, don't worry, we wouldn't have the capability to taint any significant amount of the universe even if that was our sole purpose.
My head canon is that South Park episode [0] were they find out our planet is actually an alien reality show:

> A few billion years ago we realized, "what if we took species from all different planets in the universe, and put them together, on the same planet?" Great TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deer, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet! It's great!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelled_(South_Park)
Yeah, it's harder because you'd be floating on acid rain
The Apollo mission that reached the moon was preceded by very rational steps to get there, and get back.

Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt resources on Earth and still have worse odds than a more methodical approach.
There is a broad range of possible human extinction events, e.g. asteroid impact, large-scale volcanism, viral epidemic, nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, ecological collapse, and autonomous robots [1].

Humans actively monitor and defend against each threat. In the U.S., NASA is committed to detecting asteroids, and recently successfully altered the course of one [2].

I believe we are most powerful to overcome extinction events as a united species on the planet we’ve evolved to live on over billions of years.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction

[2] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2022/9/22/the-science-behi...
What are you going to find on mars to justify a colony? Best answer I've heard is "a portion of the raw materials you'd need to build a colony", which isn't even a circular justification - it's an incomplete circle!.

Without the added justification of "because it's another planet, and that's so cool", I don't think a mars colony makes a lick of sense.
Would love to read that paper but search is not turning up any papers with that title for me. What's the exact cite?
I followed a similar strategy and was hired as a senior. Granted I had ~8 years programming experience before being hired but none of it was as a salaried SWE.
The first author wrote several blogs about crypto trading using rl, available here: https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/Blogs
>"That is what everyone in their heart is waiting for."

Nope. Not waiting for that. Does not mean I am using or ever will every feature. However if it exists and being used by others I have nothing against it.
Show HN: Computing with just one instruction – Forth on SUBLEQ
Hello HN,

This is a project of mine which contains a working, self-hosting,
Forth interpreter for a single instruction machine. The instruction
is called "SUBLEQ", short for (SUB)tract and branch if (L)ess
than or (EQ)ual.

Everything has to be synthesized from that instruction, bitwise
operators have to be implemented in terms of repeated subtraction and
self modifying code used to create indirect loads and stores. In doing
this it is possible to port a working language that is capable of
generating new images for the machine.

It's possible to play with it online at:

https://howerj.github.io/subleq.htm

(feedback welcome)

The Forth is fairly feature full and includes cooperative multitasking.
Just say independent contractor
This way, we will have companies that are open source but manage the ecosystem as they want. I don't know, maybe that's what it should be.
As a resident of Indiana, our state is generally in fine financial shape. Looking at Illinois and Michigan to either side, I would 10000% take the financial situation in my state. Illinois is a pension time bomb. Michigan can’t support their infrastructure.
Can you find a credible source describing the malfunction in the first place? It's tough to find anything beyond "some footage unusable".

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6553399/Indictment-ag...

The indictment states

>As confirmed by the video obtained from the MCC's internal video surveillance system, this was the last time anyone, including any correctional officer, walked up to, let alone entered, the only entrance to the tier in which Epstein was housed until approximately 6:30 a.m. on August 10.

I'd also note that the DOJ going after the jail guards is a pretty strong evidence against any conspiracy to murder Epstein.
Hall passes aren't about socialization; they're about dominance, submission, and domestication. And I can't honestly think of a purpose that they legitimately serve. It's just not that hard to tell the difference between the kids who are legitimately going to the restroom, and those that are wandering around aimlessly.

They seem to me like a leftover from a Victorian age in which the purpose of an education was to grind children into submission instead of nurturing them. I am genuinely surprised that such barbarisms are still used in American schools.

I'm with the finger-givers on this one.
My take on why mars: there is no countries and no established laws maintained by existing societal structures. There is just no any other power other than the nature itself. Any colony on earth is doomed to be captured by a larger power sooner or later. I think in the eyes on ppl who are dreaming about Mars, nature is a weaker foe than other man.
some people have one eye or no eyes, so on average humans have less than 2 eyes.

it's a tedious point
“The volume changes almost 300 percent if you’re doing it to its maximum capacity,”
For silicon, really, is this correct?
Isn't the acidity normal in the upper atmosphere? Though I suppose up there the advantage of greater buoyancy might be lost.
1. The Fast Fourier Transform

2. Quantum computing

3. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem

4. Denotational semantics

In all four cases, I make no claims to real expertise. However, in each of these cases there was a powerful moment of epiphany, when after much groping in a conceptual fog a light seemed to turn on, and an essential clarity, simplicity, and intuition clicked.
Self-sufficient seems like quite the bar though. I guess they wouldn't need fancy electronics etc, but I imagine they'd still need non-trivial metallurgy, chemistry and similar in order to survive.

That is, they can bring a lot of fancy stuff with them, but to be self-sufficient they'd have to be able to maintain, repair and ideally rebuild what they need indefinitely without resupplies from Earth.
I love all the efforts humans put towards trying to understand and tame the wilds of space, but it makes me immensely sad that we choose not to put the same efforts towards vastly easier & simpler problems that would have a much more immediate positive impact. Food insecurity, medical access, climate change, etc. are all problems we know how to solve - but we don't.
> People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?

Sports! Imagine playing basketball (or football, etc.) on a dome on Mars with less than half the gravity of Earth. People back on Earth would love to watch it. People on Mars would love to play it.
Putting your backups in a garbage can doesn't do much for you.

Most of the issues are already a problem on Mars, and the rest would affect earth and Mars at the same time. No less, the earthlings would be more likely to survive each of those situations because earth is way better in a general case.
A List of Predictions Made in 1923 About 2023
Apple family sharing leaks owner information
Does anyone use any password manager and do regular backups? I use 1password but it's scary that all passwords depend on it.
Bottom-up really requires the “and up” part:

- each pricing plan targets an org scale

- and the features address those problems

That’s why websites tend to go from selling you on individual features (5 servers a month!) to team features (10 headcount!) to organization features (auto-invoice! SAML!). Your entry point is the bottom user (5 server home IOT), who convinces a manager (our team needs this!), who convinces a director (we can solve this org issue!).

The problem you’re describing is “bottom only”: if you only solve the basic problem, you’ll only attract bottom clients.

(I agree with your point about middle-out; just emphasizing the “up” part of bottom-up.)
bitwarden for the everyday, lower value stuff, keepassxc on private storage for the more sensitive things like bank accounts, etc.

Once passbolt adds offline storage of a copy of the vault to their extensions I may switch to that as I am a big fan of their system, it is just annoying for a home gamer to find their internet is down and then going to log in to their router to fix it finding the password manager doesn't work.
E.g. Donald Knuth hadn't seen better paths.

"I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like. I do like C as a language, especially because it blends in with the operating system (if you're using UNIX, for example).

All through my life, I've always used the programming language that blended best with the debugging system and operating system that I'm using. If I had a better debugger for language X, and if X went well with the operating system, I would be using that."

Dec 7, 1993, Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview.
At about 55 kilometers (where it's close to 25 degrees C and maybe 2/3 of standard air pressure) there are clouds of sulfuric acid. I believe you can avoid them by going higher, but then you lose the appeal of having earthlike temperature and pressure.
Funny timing: I saw Koyaanisqatsi for the first time tonight, and there’s a section where it cuts from satellite images of a city to microchips (https://youtu.be/RSINqSvSVyM?t=402)

It made me want to look up more pics of chips, but after not getting good results searching on my own I gave up and came to HN... only to immediately see this post :)
I think of starship works well permanent LEO habitation is next. Once space access is cheap enough…space hotels are an obvious first move to commercialization.
Colonizing Mars is going to be easier than solving tragedy of the commons.
I’m fanatical about functional programming, and I would never choose this example to demonstrate why I am. The imperative code doesn’t demonstrate any kind of problem (see Rich Hickey’s explanation of transient types), and the functional code demonstrates how but not why. I’d certainly use a modified version of this example where the inputs might be mutated by other parts of a program. But without that, this is just philosophical navel gazing pretending to explain how to solve mysterious problems.
And a lot of the survivors from Earth would head over to Mars to overwrite your backup.
From my experience playing around with dreambooth in the last few weeks generating images of a specific person or pet (not just a generic concept), it surprisingly works really well. But you have to make sure to feed it enough pictures, make sure to label the images properly, use smaller learning rate, use prior preservation loss and make sure to not overfit, etc.

For the animation stuff where you need frame to frame consistency, the new diffusion based video models show that it's possible [1][2]. These are not open source yet as far I know, but it's highly likely that we'll get them within a few months.

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11565.pdf

2: https://imagen.research.google/video/paper.pdf
In many cases, you see the opposite - a strong public sentiment to allow or even force secession of some territory that is perceived as a "burden". This is usually represented in economic terms - "why do we have to feed X?" - but it can also be motivated by culture, religion, ideology etc (but, quite often, still coached in economic terms).
Professional:
- Primary goal is to kickstart my career in AI/Data.
- Improve my understanding of Pytorch, and the popular papers in paperswithcode.
- Prioritize writing (code/text) over reading.

Personal:
- Reduce my weight, considering doc's warning. The focus is on cardio over weights.
- Improve relationships, to give proper listening space without judgement.
- Better utilization of time.

Wishing everyone in this thread a great 2023, and the strength to fulfil what they're wishing and striving for.
I still struggle with SD 2.0 prompting because many of the tricks (greg, artstation) don't work anymore, have people had success with it or do I have to use custom models?
This would be super fun to use with "Return to Zork" clips.
I actually think this would be a great idea...for the Moon. Pro-athletes making millions of dollars per year won't want to spend their whole lives in a desolate, extremely remote desert. The Moon has a much more reasonable commute.

And I think some new sport would need to be invented.
Where can I read more about this? Super interesting.
Not only lockdowns reduced suicide rates, but, suicide rates in the age group 12-18 is always low in the months of summer vacation.

And the data from early 90s to present year confirm that.
It'd be funny if it's similar to when changing which side of the road people drive on: everyone has to make the change simultaneously.

It'd also be funny to live in a world that doesn't consider possibilities like this.
DuckDuckGo is just Bing with more link filtration. I find myself having to use Yandex to seriously search for anything.
What I learned writing a short story every week for a year in 2022
Bypass paywalls extension for Firefox
I believe archive.today also works
This happened to music and TV/movies:

People pay relatively little per album, movie, or show — which is made up mostly in upsells (merchandise) or hosted versions (concerts, theaters).

I think that may just be the fate of easily copied IP — which is good for society.
Two weeks ago I was heading to go for a run and my 8 year old declared he was coming with me (this was 630AM on a school day). We did 1.25 miles but the most interesting thing he said was that we weren’t running, we were just jogging. It was a slow 12’ pace… slower than I’d go solo but I didn’t want to wear him out.

Anyway, this bias you mention seems to be taught/ingrained at a young age!
The biggest threat with this scheme is you. After that your kids, your house keeper, your friends and visitors.
> A decent LSP makes it trivial to see which function is being called.

We're talking about replacing C here. Requiring everyone depend on a hefty LSP to make sense of source code is a big ask.

Source code is text. I firmly believe that all semantic information of a piece of source code should be expressed as text in said piece of code. I already see code where the language allows the programmer to omit types from variables for 'brevity', and the assumption then is that everyone working on that code is using a fancy enough text editor that can stick in extra labels to show the missing type information. Absolutely baffling to me how people find that acceptable in any way.
the "eggs in one basket" argument only makes sense if Martian colonization is itself just step 1 on a list of dozens of similarly-difficult leaps to get us to terraforming and interstellar colonization.

It's a very exciting, multi-generational project to think about. Though frankly I think we're going to get AGI + brain/computer interfaces + cloud mind uploads before we get martian terraforming; and dropping the bag-of-meat related requirements would make extraterrestrial colonization much easier.
Is it just me, or was anybody else reminded of the Carmageddon cover art after seeing the image they ended up using for Dr. Venom?
The same legal processes that can be used to recover funds stolen from your bank account or stocks stolen from your brokerage account can be used to recover cryptocurrency.

>When your crypto is stolen, the theft cannot be reversed, by design.

If someone sends you a phishing link, gets your info, logs into your online banking and sends all of your money overseas, that theft generally can't be reversed either. (You'll find that the CFPB recently updated their Reg E interpretation on this, but that interpretation isn't binding and directly contradicts decades of practice)

If you're a business and get hit by banking malware, you're similarly fucked.
Would code need to be broken? I thought it was normal to deprecate features and then have the compiler throw a warning.
Interpreting search results
Houston is the only major Texas city without zoning, and Houston still has plenty of parking requirements. As a result, both housing for people and housing for cars is really cheap. At this rate, Houston is going to figure out how to fix its planning mistakes of the past much faster than more regulated cities are going to decide to build enough housing for the people who want to live there. I'd never bet against Houston, or Texas in general.

How about we ease up on both zoning restrictions and parking requirements?
Point 3 also hit me a few months ago during a Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast about Rome. Caesar got back from his conquests and half the senate wanted to punish him for crimes against humanity that he conducted during his wars. However, he also claimed massive amounts of land for Rome. Long story short: he wasn’t punished. And this happened 2000 years ago.
This is missing the point, which is to consistently have something interesting to say. If you don't have that, then you don't have a blog worth following.

What Twitter does is "make it up in volume". Most individual tweets, and most individual tweeters, are not particularly interesting. But when you collect enough tweeters and tweets together, the odds are that there may be some diamonds in the rough at any given point in time.