skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you’re talking about the US, then the laws absolutely exist. They were created to break up companies like Bell and Standard Oil, and are extremely effective, when used.

But they haven’t been used for decades, because regulators have decided not to use them. There are of course many reasons for that, including political pressure and regulatory capture. But to say the laws don’t exist, is just wrong. They exist, they just haven’t been used for a long time.

Also writing law to obligate enforcement is tautological. All law is meant to be enforced. Who’s gonna enforce the enforcement of enforcement laws? And why would they not be subject to same pressures to under-enforce as well?

> Concluding that regulation dosn't help when what we're observing is non-enforcement is a bit disingenuous. If I'm being charitable.

Why do think I came to that conclusion? My comment argues quite the opposite.
Advice I often give is to give them what you had growing up (or if you want, what you dreamed of having back then). The idea being that you'll have an intimate understanding of it and know when/when not to guide. Also gives a reference point for where their future devices came from, which builds understanding and makes them seem less like a magic box.

Combine that later with giving them access to what you use professionally. I graduated to Photoshop, Final Cut, etc. later via my dad.

Re. graphics/animation:

Depending on their age, an old copy of Kid Pix could be very entertaining. Good introduction to the concept of professional tools (Affinity, Photoshop, etc.) but a much more engaging UI (sound, skeuomorphism). Lets you add basic interactivity also.

What I haven't found a modern alternative to, but would recommend (somehow) would be Flash. It was a unique intersection between graphics, animation, and programming. I hacked together trading cards, games, stop-motion, websites, and animation with it and use principles I learned there every day.

Possibly the simplest equivalent today I've encountered would be Tumult Hype (note: Mac only :/). Nowhere near the same ecosystem, but it has a similar animation workflow (timeline, keyframing, nested animations, etc.). It lacks some of the additional artistic emphasis that made Flash so iconic and is really more of a straight web animation tool, but I suspect a kid could make more imaginative animations with it that I do. :)
It's not a compatibility test. They're questions designed to foster feelings of "closeness".

I did this with a random stranger on Imgur a few years back. It was remarkably effective.
But this case is exactly by people who are not tolerant.
add some chatgpt for making it to YC. :)
No, I was talking about the temptation of mining existing biomass. The focus on yield was a change of subject. But even then, algae is greatly overhyped, for a number of reasons. First, as I mentioned, separating it from water is something of a showstopper (and no, it's not easier than cutting down trees). Second, it rapidly reproduces, with a generation time much shorter than a growing season, so keeping out undesirable wild species is difficult. Third, high yields require a lot of CO2, to the extent that simply absorbing CO2 into a pond isn't enough; instead bioreactors with an external source of CO2 are needed. That vastly increases capital cost over a simple field (and if the CO2 is from combustion of fossil fuels, then that's a fraud not a zero CO2 source of fuel.) Evaporation of water will be a big negative.

Algae might work if one can get species that grown in extremely alkaline conditions, with water that can be sprayed into the air and recovered to scrub CO2 into the solution from the air. There are algae that grow in suck alkaline lakes. To get around the wild contamination problem would likely require engineering the algae to survive some kinds of poisons, then filling the water with those poisons as well to kill everything you don't want there. This wouldn't be very environmentally friendly. You still have the water separation problem, now made harder by the water being alkaline and toxic.

> Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.

The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
In Germany it’s a complicated bureaucratic mess and people often get can get a lot back but of course not always.
> The rough thinking is we should keep pushing for energy growth until we physically can't any more

Not sure that's a good idea, see https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
>leading me to wonder if it holds a unique level of importance among the other strategies.

Nah, it's just very easy to understand while being of technical nature. People tend to feel smart when they grasp it and then they can't shut up about it. They even write musicals...
As for the follow the money argument, what about this: most no vax people I know in my european country, are avid consumers of natural remedies of various sorts (not only homeopathy)

They can easily spend way more than 80eu on various natural pills.

Does it mean that the anti-vax movement is actually funded by the "Big Natura" complex?
100,000 flights every day of the year globally emit 2% of emissions.

I’m not sure why everyone talks about flying. It’s a rounding error.

I never realized South Africa was such a big emitter of CO2.

It only has 15 coal power plants?

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africa-taken-cour...
Gorp!
> This is circular reasoning

Yes. Or, in other words, a feedback loop.

> I realize that this is an absolute basic tenet of capitalism that you’re talking about, but this response only explains where we are, not why we’re there.

It does both: we are here because it's a self-sustaining negative feedback loop. How exactly we got here has been long lost to history, and the specifics don't matter anyway: what matters is, how hard would it be to break out of this state, whether it's worth doing in the first place, and, if we somehow break the cycle, what's there to stop us from immediately falling back into it.
Assembly Optimization Tips (2004)
>> This means that an algorithm cannot discover or generate truly novel properties or relations that were not (at least implicitly) considered in its original ontology.

> A text stream of arbitrary length...

Maybe you could state this in some form of "turing completeness":

As soon as a program has [vast enough output space] and allows for [enough recursive recombinations] then it can produce [everything].

In the wording of the article: If everything is implicitly considered, then there's nothing that can not be produced.
Advertisers have no choice but to go where the eyeballs are. So I don't see how they could possibly drop Google unless Google loses those eyeballs. If they could, then Google wouldn't be so exploitative.
For “deep zoom” applications, such as microscope slide images or a “google maps” app, I can imagine that developers get the idea to let the browser do the panning/zooming. Then you could run into limits like this. But he should have tested if this works before building the app.
One of my personal projects that I never pushed forward is a blog "a monopoly a day" (under-titled "keeps the EU away"). The idea is that everyday, I want to show small-ish negative impact of a big tech monopoly, and explaining it. The goal is that the sheer recurrence is enough to convince people of the negative impact on innovation and societal growth big companies have.

(That's with a pretty broad definition of "monopoly", including "user-specific monopoly" like you get with android / ios, notions that I would also try to explain in said blog)

One example:

> https://mobilesyrup.com/2016/09/27/why-blackberry-never-rele...

> I believe this one shows how a monopoly can prevent innovation. Blackberry with the Passport had a new form-factor. To make this phone worthwhile, it had to use a mainline OS. At the time, only Android with Google apps was available. However, Google rules back then couldn't allow this.

Would HNers be interested in such content? And in contributing to it? (my knowledge wrt monopolies is in my area of expertise, and let's just say I like being employable, so it's better if it doesn't look completely targetted)
AIUI you can implement inheritance as a pattern on top of existential types, using a self-recursive definition trick. Not sure if Rust has full existential types yet, but they're definitely a goal since they're needed e.g. for better async support.
Sure you can.

I’ve done “prac tests” before when I was studying CS. The test happened in a computer lab. We were given some specs and had to submit programs which implemented the specs. (The specs were written in a way that grading could happen automatically).

Just do the same thing, except the student is given some code with some failing tests. Their grade is determined by how many of the bugs they can fix within the time allotted.
Honestly I ran Mac for 3 years or so and i3 was one of the reasons I went back to the Linux.

That and the "war on hackers" that Apple seem to wage last few years also did not help (breaking uBlock in Safari, inability to permanently disable some system services without having to disable SIP and thus losing ApplePay+disk encryption to name a few)
If that's the goal and I agree that's not a bad goal at all, we seem to have decoupled that from the outcomes.

Are energy companies even really doing that much to grow their energy production? Are we seeing much in the way of producers materially investing in increasing their production thus flooding their markets in a race to the bottom? It feels like a lot of these things have stalled out at present, or am I being too cynical?
Slidge v0.1.0-RC1: An XMPP to IM walled gardens (Signal, WhatsApp, and 6 others)
For no reason besides having been usable enough for my own needs for a few months now, I tagged the current status of my hobby project a "v0.1.0rc1".

It's an XMPP server-side component that acts a client to various instant messaging chat networks, letting you use your favorite XMPP clients to centralise all your chatting needs. Some sort of "multi-device, multi-protocol chat 'app'". It supports

Happy to hear any feedback about it, or why it's a bad idea to use XMPP because it's obsolete (it's not), or why it's a bad idea to use these walled gardens anyway (spoiler: I agree).
I made a pre-processor [1] to add similar features to C, and after reading your comment I’m thinking that it would be simple to add a setting/#pragma to do these transformations:

list->init(); → list->init(list);
list.init(); → list.init(&list);

[1] https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#back...

I normally avoid the function pointer overhead, which can be done with _Generic:

#define append(VEC, START, END) _Generic((VEC), \
Vec_float*: append_Vec_float, \
Vec_str*: append_Vec_str, \
Vec_cstr*: append_Vec_cstr \
)(VEC, START, END)

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#loop...

But list->init(list) might be a simpler solution for most cases, and compatible with C89/C99.
Modern progressivism does distinguish instances of “punching down”, yes. That’s no secret and is not intended to be.

That’s not the point, though. Turning this into a “what about the white men!” whinge is blatantly misrepresenting this scenario as the result of “modern progressivism” when it’s actually something else.

I believe that you’re not going to find many proponents of the sort of progressivism that the “white about the white men!?”crowd fight against, that are actually in favour of this decision. Furthermore I believe that you’d find plenty that are against it.

Around the proponents of this ideology are concentric circles of people making misguided attempts to “capitulate to this PC culture”, often as an ass-covering tactic. By the time you get to a layperson perceiving ‘the culture’, it’s a xerox of a xerox of a xerox created by various corporate HR, PR, and marketing departments. Then, of course, you’ve got the people revolting against Big Org #836 mandating wearing pronoun pins in the office when that’s clearly not something any trans person would advocate for. The collective facepalming at misguided attempts to pander to “LGBTQIA+” is a big part of the current queer community / culture. This is just the community I am familiar with. I imagine it’s the same elsewhere.

I don’t believe that this is much of a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. It’s pretty easy to draw a logical bound between those that believe in the cause, and the rest.

I do not believe that this action was taken as a genuine act of modern progressivism. It’s a typical corporate ‘make this go away and don’t upset the minorities with megaphones’ action. But we’ve got some great keywords like “university” and “Muslim” which opportunists obnoxiously use to fuel the culture war.
The joke was that under extreme duress, and individual (or a team) might produce a miracle.

The ethical question is: if it's a genuine miracle (say, a discovery or invention that breaks new ground or was previously thought to be impossible), can the duress be justified?
There are two things commenters are signalling here, preserved with instant recall if in the future you need to confirm their leaning:

1. Their aspect on what’s wrong with unlimited access to sanctioned imagery.

2. Their aspect on how to comply or at least avoid a lawsuit.

Once someone has answered #1, you can ballpark whether they find some sanctioned images more hazardous than others. Which means you can ask around #2: consider a small polity passing an ID law for access to social media. How will the mechanisms in the law work?
Exactly it doesn't. Android would have gone away or been a DIY tool.

And in a proper anti-trust environment, the app store (which Steve Jobs really resisted anyway) wouldn't have been permitted to act the way it did and probably make the iPhone too restrictive for most people to adopt.

So other consumer-driven solutions would have come about. It's not rocket science.
> We elaborate on the relation between affordances and algorithms—defined as computational processes that can run on universal Turing machines—ultimately arriving at the conclusion that identifying and leveraging affordances goes beyond algorithmic computation.

Brains are physical systems, and physical systems can be simulated by algorithms. Right? Do the authors think this 'jury-rigging' is some non-physical process?
What time horizon are we solving for? I recall a case study (apologies I do not have the reference) in business school that if everyone cycled as suggested in the article - life expectancy would increase significantly for the population leading to more carbon emissions in the long run.
To underline the point, nearly half of American Catholics are pro-choice. Religions really aren't a monolith, even when the stern Official Doctrine is quite clear.
The other advantage is that in programing you introduce functions with some hand-waving and "black boxes".

I told my children this is something you put data in , it does some magic, and your get some data out. I started with some built-in functions (or functions I wrote and hide) so that they understand the mechanics.

Then they finally asked "can I do my own function?" and, bam, there we were :)

Removing the ceremonial of mathematical correctness helped a lot.

This is also the reason I am sad we do not give children half- (or 3/4-) lies: we tell them something more or less correct so that they can play with it (making sure they do not stumble upon edge cases) and then refine their knowledge.

This is what my math prof on my 3rd year of physics did: he said "I will give you a neat trick I will not explain because it will be super useful to you now. Next year, when you understand it, it won't be of any practical use anymore". I was not traumatized.
Can ads be GDPR compliant?
I'm curious if you could use this not for data science tasks but for data engineering tasks - say read a csv or pull a table from oracle and store it as delta lake table or something.

I know its a boring use case, but the challenge with it is that it is a complete waste of money and carbon footprint to use Spark to process a 20 MB CSV or table with few thousand records, but tools like Pandas fall apart when you hit a 50 GB CSV or table with few billion records.

Something more efficient (say, in Rust and not Python or Java) and yet scalable (due to not fitting everything into memory) would be a great help here.
Turbo tax and H&R Block, companies that produce software for filling taxes, lobby to keep taxes complex and non-easy (unless you pay for their software)
Well, when I said relevant or not relevant, significant or whatever, I mean in terms of the class "art history".

It's not like any of the painting depictions had any notable art styles nor new techniques, from what I can tell. So I think it crosses moreso into the intersection of religion and art, that's why historical context becomes relevant. If you deem context irrelevant then why include any of it unless the art has some different quality about it?

I think there was art novelty with the decorations of churches and mosques though.
Only for those that never bothered with the later improvements to bring back Me and related features.

What VB.NET really missed out was being as easy as VB 6 to produce native binaries and COM libraries. Which also affected the other .NET offerings anyway.

And nowadays CLR seems to mean C# Language Runtime anyway, so that is a moot point.
I'm seeing a steady stream of people arriving on the instance I co-admin, and many of them are staying. Quite a few post on Twitter as well, but many are commenting that Mastodon is a nicer community, and they get better engagement.

For me it's just a case of "I've got a nice community, and I'm staying". I watch all the articles and doom-saying about Mastodon, and I just don't care what these people think, or what they obviously believe are deep and meaningful insights. I'm pleased they are there, because they are raising public awareness of Mastodon-as-a-Platform, but in the end, of what other value are these articles? They predict Mastodon will fail, they predict Mastodon users will abandon the platform and return to Twitter, they predict all sorts of things.

My community is growing nicely, thank you. I see very little value in the predictions contained in articles like this.

"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." -- Brendan Behan
While I like that sentiment and personally I fit into your lifestyle, I think it's worth considering the tradeoffs.

Europe does the above because they have too -- their population density is huge and they historically hit the max humans / land ratio (given historic food production technology at the time). This is eminently not true for the Americas and much of Oceania. The massive amounts of land in the latter areas are probably one of a few primary factors in why there is so much sprawl there.

In particular, I think many people fundamentally enjoy single family homes with a lawn, or having more space even within a city. Once you have a region (e.g. Bay Area) with enough people with single family homes, the road network has a network effect and a phase transition that suddenly favors car.
It was iPhoneOS at launch, but prior to that it was formally known as "OS X."
Best Developer Swag for 2023
Awesome Cue: A curated list of CUE projects, libraries, tools and resources
Judging by this response you don't seem to have many things that could or would take up your spare time.

Please, please please think about you comment when/if you ever have kids. I guarantee your perspective will have changed a great deal.
I read the GP comment more charitably than that in the context of the thread in general terms.

More like "if one arbitrary student (of no particular description) can cause this much damage, how much damage can multiple like-minded students (of any particular alliance) cause?" And that question would apply to secularists Muslims Christians etc. equally.

Not necessarily "if one Muslim can do this, how much damage can lots of Muslims do?"

But maybe I'm wrong? I could see how you got that impression upon rereading the comment.
The authors concede that what they call algorithmic AI could, in principle, mimic organic intelligence arbitrarily closely. To maintain that this is not intelligence without begging the question, they need to have some relevant difference between the two which is not simply saying that Turing machines and living organisms are different categories. From the discussion (and especially section 7) it is clear that all their attempts to defend their position will fall back on one thing: Turing machines are deterministic.

The simplest response to that is that as soon as a machine (including a digital computer) is interacting with the real world, it is tapping into a source of entropy and its behavior is no longer determined fully by its programming. Alternatively, if one holds that the universe is deterministic, then living organisms are, which also defeats the author's last stand.
That's a reference to South Parks great 200/201 episode, which are all about that topic and in which Kyles speech at the end got censored. Despite there is no single frame, where Muhammad is shown. But the speech probably contained too much uncomfortable truth :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TMHIYDHMSE

"If there's anything we have learned, is that terrorizing works"

"If you don't want people to make fun of you anymore, all you need are guns and bombs"
Removing Things Is Good
It's ok to wonder at new (to you) knowledge and relay it with passion, even as grizzled vets look on, some scoffing, some with hope. This is the exact type of reaction that makes people turn off the YT comments ... came here to see how deep in the comments this would be; it's the 4th one
A trade deficit is not the same as a loss. It means that the UK ended up with more goods and the Indians ended up with more currency. If the goods are more valuable than the currency, it's still an economic gain for the UK. The US runs a trade deficit every year, and is far from going broke.
Simplicity? Well, if you're used to GNU Radio maybe ;)

The graph view on top will be very off-putting to normal users. It's even off-putting to me and I'm a huge nerd.

I'd rather hide the non-destructive nature in a normal graphical editor UI people are used to. So people can edit away and when they're happy with a version of the file they can just flag it. And then they can jump between those flagged versions or browse the whole history with instant revision switching.

I've done something similar with an audio editor.
If we all lived like the Dutch global emissions would rise by 3-4bn tonnes (back of the napkin math). That is IF each and every country had the standard of living that the Netherlands enjoy.

Very easy to baamboozle people with hypotheticals constrained to just one fundamental.
It’s more like “the algorithm is stupid, so it can’t fix bad literature in its brain like humans do”
Yes, flying is just another staw on the camel's back!

Methane emission from the oil industry is another "rounding error". By your logic we should just ignore it.

The solution is obvious: Just levy a carbon tax and let the markets sort it out.
Faroe Islands is a tiny speck. Countries are a cross between oil tankers and nuclear power plants.

There's nothing to learn politicians have debated every single tax system known to human civilization. But even small changes are Herculean tasks.