skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> mass extinction events seem to be really good at creating space for new forms of life to develop

To what end? Life on this planet has about a 1 billion year run way left since the sun will start to expand and eventually strip away Earth's atmosphere and finally swallow the planet whole. It's taken 3.7 billion years to get to this point and most of the "interesting" evolution has occurred in only the last 500 million years. So it is true that the next 500 million should be even more diverse.

However unless another intelligent life form develops the point is moot. No matter how smart a dolphin, or raven, or chimp, or octopus is... if it can't escape this rock then it's not much different from a bacteria colony that dies out when it's food source is exhausted.

Evolution is random. For all we know an even more intelligent form of life will develop than us humans but on the other hand it's possible that for the next billion years we are the only fluke in the evolutionary timeline and nothing else will develop.

Finally there's a third option that is within the grasp of humanity which is to say we can branch off Earth's tree of life and take it into space while leaving Earth to develop as it will.
Body-shaming with the veneer of academic rigor.
Makes sense. Thanks for chiming in!
The timeline on this post is days.
Gmail might be considered a resounding in-house success, for market penetration & data harvesting potential.
Precisely the advantage of credit cards is that your money can never be stolen, only the bank's money. People keep talking about fraud protection, but that's the difference between a debit card and a credit card. When your debit card or actual bank account information is stolen or used fraudulently, your money is gone, until the bank deals with the situation. When your credit card is stolen, the bank's money is gone. You never owe it, you never pay for it, you have exactly the same amount of money you had before the card was stolen. You're not suddenly short money until some process runs to completion. You are at most dealing with the inconvenience of not being able to charge that card anymore until you get a new one.

A surprising amount of people also get away with spending the bank's money and never paying them back, which I suppose some people also see as a benefit. They probably do pay enough late fees, interest, etc. in their life that the bank comes out ahead anyway, but I know multiple people who simply didn't pay on a credit card - ever - and nothing happened to them, other than a few-years credit hit that didn't stop other companies from continuing to offer credit.
Closer to us, and we are great.
I don’t think so, at least if you assume that each concrete solution can be expressed in finite length in a formal language with a finite alphabet, and can be mechanically checked (which is generally the case for mathematical proofs). Because then you could just enumerate all strings of that language until you find one that describes the solution to the given problem, which by your second item would be guaranteed to exist, and thus the procedure be guaranteed to terminate, contradicting your first item.
I can remember things I've done before there was internet, barely ;-)
> Seven clusters, all in rural areas, had a low risk of an association between autism and family lineage.

> “We’re really not sure why some rural areas seemed to have what might be called a protective effect,” Richards-Steed says. “It’s certainly possible that parents and grandparents living in urban areas had different environmental exposures or experiences.”

> “What we can say, based on our findings, is what we are being exposed to now is probably not just affecting us or even our children but maybe even our children’s children.”

> “Evidence shows our environment has a deterministic effect on our growth and development, which includes the germline cells we carry for the next generation,” VanDerslice says.

tl;dr: a less toxic environment certainly helps
Typing would make things more verbose, but not any more readable than just writing words for each type of data you're dealing with, which accomplishes the same thing. Forth can dictionary mask and forget words, so typed-lang-style overloading is trivial, but unnecessary.

Many short word names could be expanded from symbols and abbreviations suited for 4-character names into more verbose versions, but the underlying RPN stackiness would still prove an impediment to broad understanding.

Native vectorization like APL or Lisp would increase the base complexity of the language machinery and make implementation more complex, but would allow the language to be simpler by getting rid of the need for most stack reordering.
It already exists and its called xwayland. Most wayland compositors also have X11 WM inside them...
Process of elimination: it only says that it supports Norwegian Bokmål. ;)
Google Ads, kubernetes, go to name some more
Well guess what when there's no humans left alive, whether this is anything no longer matters because the value system died with them.
Lots of ways to test in production. IMO the way you are suggesting – injecting synthetic data into prod – is the worst of both worlds. You aren't actually testing real world use cases, and end up polluting your prod environment.

Some common ways to go about it:

- Feature flags: every new change goes into your codebase behind a flag. You can flip the flag for a limited set of users and do a broader rollout when ready.

- Staged rollouts: have staging/canary etc. environments and roll out new deployments to them first. Observe metrics and alerts to check if something is wrong.

- Beta releases: have a group of internal/external power users test your features before they go out to the world.
Maybe a bit off topic, but:

* What language is that software written in?

* What was the hardest problem you had to solve, while working on it?
I work for a B2E company that has a structure similar to Salesforce. We test in production all the time even for our secure environments where the data is highly sensitive.

Re: data, it’s a somewhat common practice to notionalize data (think isomorphically faking data). We regularly do this and will often designate rows as notional to hide them from users who aren’t admins. I’ve found this to work exceptionally well; we do this 1-2 times a week, ensure there’s a closed circuit for notional data, and for more critical systems we’ll inform our customers that testing will occur.

I’m sure there are more complex and automated solutions but when it comes to testing, simple and flexible is often the way to go.
What does "drive crashed hard" mean? It can't mean the physical drive was toast, unless you're using some flavor of RAID in your daily driver.
For me it was especially shocking because I've experienced no transition, straight from 0 to 100 instead.

I've always exclusively interacted with Youtube from my PC, with uBlock enabled. I don't see ads and because I haven't for such a long time, I've normalized that state.

Until I got a new TV, with a fancy TV OS. My mother-in-law was visiting and I was trying to play some clips of her favorite music via the TV app. I was absolutely shocked. Every 2 minutes or so, 2 brief ads in succession.

It makes viewing anything with joy impossible. You can't get into the moment as its constantly stopped in its tracks. Absolute hellish ad regime.
Note: if you plan on accurate financial planning and metrics (esp. if going public), you need to be able to separate your test prod stats from the real prod stats for reporting.
This is the reason. LFSRs are much simpler to implement, and in those days, every transistor saved was very important.

Some early microprocessors used LFSRs instead of a regular counter for their instruction pointer register for this reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8375577
A billion years seems to be a LOT of time for many mass extinction events. I think your argument leans on “interesting” a lot, which has its basis in our narcissism. Again, it only feels important that the life be “interesting” if we’re here to care.

Just to restate: I’m not saying we don’t act selfishly. I sure would. Let’s just not pretend we’re being altruistic.
You’re positing that the physical differences between men and women are materially inconsequential, have no impact on social behavior, and somehow cease before impacting the brain — and you deign to accuse everyone else of “anti-scientifism”?

You’re welcome to the opinion, but denying obvious, observable, verifiable reality because it fails to fit your dogmatic model of the world is not science; co-opting science and denying biological reality in service of your activism is far closer to both colonialism and sexism than any of the views you’re arguing against.
Article written by someone who experienced Emacs as being slow and janky. Yet Emacs is one of the fastest software I use. Now I am definitely an Emacs power user: I started using the native-compilation branch as soon as it came out, I don't mind building from the source the latest version available when I see something that picks my interest, I've got about 3 000 lines of custom elisp code, I'll be using other really fast stuff, like burntsushi's amazing ripgrep, directly from Emacs, fzf too, etc.

I don't understand the criticism about Cider: I use it daily.

Emacs 29 with libjansson and native-compilation is plenty fast.

And most of all: apparently every single new version of Emacs not only runs but also compiles faster. And this is coupled with my computers which only gets faster too.

At the moment I'm running Emacs 29 on a AMD 3700X, soon to be replaced with a 7700 or 7700X. That's going to be yet another performance gain.

Most software only get slower and slower with each release (I was already using IntelliJ IDEA back when it was a version 4 and already bloated, since then it's been downhill perf-wise): Emacs, on the contrary, always keeps getting faster.

And the goodies added to Emacs lately are just insane: native-compilation, LSP support, tree-sitter (it's just been included in Emacs and it should bring yet another round of crazy speedups)...
Invest in yourself. Become a better human being. Everything else will follow.
The Wallfacers were amazing. I also liked how "no good deed goes unpunished" applies to everyone who saves humanity from extinction. I suspect this is the part that actually rubs most people the wrong way.
Strongly suspect that social media usage is worse than smoking for middle and high schoolers
The unskippable ads are getting progressively more aggressive too. Two 30-second unskippable ads on an 8-minute video? It’s a disaster.
They had something like a near-death experience under Ballmer. Nadella brought them back from it. For a long time, people really did give them up for dead.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34384838, I think it disproves your last sentence — at least when assuming that all solutions and all proofs of non-existence of a solution are expressible in a shared formal language.
> the drive would use its spinning-down motor as a generator

Is that what it means to have a "hybrid" drive? Prius and Seagate had a kid?
Still unclear to me what the benefits are for ESM. So far it is a pain in the ass because a few developers force ESM through your throat.
I was heavily addicted to Diablo 2, playing nonstop for months on end. I watch let’s play videos and can skip through the grind while getting the endorphin hit. I’ve played the re-master for maybe 16-24 hours total in 12 months. For me it’s less about the cost of the game and more about the potential amount of time I may sink into it.
Rejoice, as you have issues that are really easy to improve upon.

First of all, don’t ever argue about solutions with your peers (e.g. whitespaces), and dive deep (Can you imagine that it is hard for others to read your code? Have you tried reading your own code that you have not touched for 5-10 years? Etc.). From what I hear, you might just ask the question to yourself before you confront your coworkers. And then ask Why at least several more times for every answer.

You also are very close to understanding the core issues: It typically matters to understand the business problem and find the simplest solution, with the least effort to resolve any problems.

You might get good mileage out of studying domain driven design at this point in your path.
Really great explanation. Thank you.
I watched this interesting discussion, suffice to say there seem to be a big difference between to two. Roles of the unions seems so vastly different, they might as well use separate words.
A/B tests and feature flags are basically testing in prod. And yes, some of those features sometimes run as a "well, it should work, but we're not entirely sure until we get a significant number of users using the system". It could be an edge case failing or scalability requirements being wrong.

Another variation on the same theme is rewriting systems when you run production data through both systems. Quite often that's the only way of doin migrations to a new platform, or a new database, or yes, a newly re-written system.

> Is it common practice to inject fabricated data into a prod system to run such tests? What's the best practice or prior art on doing this well?

A very common practice is to run a snapshot of prod data (e.g. last hour, or last 24 hours, or even a week/month/year) through a system in staging (or cooking, or pre-cooking, or whatever name you give the system that's just about to be released). However, doing it properly may not be easy, and depends on the systems involved.
Sometimes one cannot get the exact same specs on test hardware versus production, yet a rollout depends on simulating system load to shake out issues.

Performance testing needs a schedule, visibility, timebox, known scope, backout plan, data revert plan, pre- and post-graphs.

Schedule. Folks are clearly tagged in a
table with times down the side.

Visibility. Folks who should know know
when it's going to happen,
are invited to the session,
and are mentioned in the
distributed schedule.

Timebox. It's going to start at a
defined time and end on a
defined time.

Known scope. Is it going to fulfill an
order? How many accounts
created?

Backout plan. DBA and DevOps on standby
for stopping the test.

Data revert plan. We know what rows to
delete or update after
testing.

Pretty pictures. You want to show graphs
during the test, so
that you know what to
improve and everyone's
time wasn't wasted.

Reference: observing successful runs that didn't result in problems later.
Be careful with this - IIRC some of the recipes aren't very safe.

I think the Army's "Improvised Munitions Handbook" is better/safer - for educational purposes only of course... :-)

https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handboo...
If life blooms on a wet rock but nobody’s around to say, “that’s pretty,” did it matter?
> Did it affect you?

What's wrong with caring about things that affect others instead of only about things that affect yourself?
I think this is really misguided.

While it's true that the stack just enables you build something for people, if you just chase market you have a good chance of piling up technical debt and slowing down before you get there.

I have seen far too many projects take twice or five times as much budget as needed because people didn't know what they were doing from the get go.

Greenfield applications should start with a rough idea of what the technical requirements will be (what ordr of magnitude of users / transactions per second) and start by cloning a reference implementation that does what's needed. Otherwise you will never get ahead of product.
I would wager that Isaac Newton would have been hesitant to claim that an asteroid’s trajectory could be modified by humans.
Ditto regarding Paypal: you need a sandbox API token to get started with it. Their sandbox token generator was broken for MONTHS, I could not believe it. By the time we got the token, we already fixed all bugs on our side the hard way - by testing in prod - and moved on.
Far-reaching ban on single-use plastics in England
I found that some Easter eggs weren't archived by EAC due to the fact they subly broke the CD spec. An example would be the first song of some versions of White Ladder by David Gray have a song "before" the first song. You press play then press "rewind" and the timer goes to -0:01 ... -3:45 or whatever and a song plays before the regular song at 0:00. I was tricky to hear it with a CD player because the rewind behavior was kind of undefined.

https://eeggs.com/items/8745.html
Considering the Earth was much hotter and colder with vastly different concentrations of atmospheric gasses at given points in time than it is today, yes it is "sustainable". The planet and life at large do not give a damn.

The Earth will continue to orbit and spin and life will go on, until one day the Sun decides it's time to get fat and eat a couple planets.
Nature doesn't try and do anything. Nature is constantly trying to murder everything around it. The most lethal diseases to man are natural, and often common skin bacteria which everyone carries.

There's a viral form of cancer which is wiping out the Tasmanian Devil right now, just because.

Nature and evolution has no plan and no morality, it has survivors and a balanced ecosystem is a cold war stalemate.
I would have liked for the story to have noted, at least in passing, that 3³+4³+5³ = 6³.

(I found this in the brilliantly mad "The celestial inspirations for Giza, Stonehenge and Washington D.C." by Robin Spivey:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robin-Spivey-2/publicat...

Along with that, the Great Pyramid's latitude in degrees matches, to 6 digits, the speed of light in m/s divided by 10000; the King's chamber is precisely 5π/3 and also 2φ² meters wide; and that latitude in radians is π/6. Suffice to say that numerical coincidences everywhere are more the norm than the exception.)
Wish I had enough time for retro projects like this. New stuff gives me too much trouble and takes up too much of my waking hours.
Bureaucracy is certainly not new, as WalterBright and others have observed.

When Xerox was first trying to commercialize PARC inventions, it was estimated that IBM's bureaucracy was so bad that it would take them nine months to ship an empty box.
> Yasuke was an African warrior in the employ of Nobunaga, a powerful feudal lord known as the “Great Unifier,” during Japan’s Sengoku period. The first Black samurai, he was at Nobunaga’s side when the daimyo died; according to popular lore, Nobunaga tasked Yasuke with returning his head to his son.

> Beyond his relationship with the famous warlord, Yasuke was a barrier-breaking figure in his own right. Though his life is poorly documented, his story speaks to the surprising cultural connections that existed in 16th-century Japan.

Whenever I see anything like this, I'm immediately skeptical and consider the possibility that some modern is anachronistically and inaccurately interpreting some ancient text through the lens of modern racial categories and descriptions.

Was this guy "Black" in the modern sense (as in a very dark-skinned person of African descent) or "black" in some other sense? I'm reminded of some British scientist or scholar from hundreds of years ago who was described as "black" in some contemporary document, which a lot of people took to mean black-as-African, except that description in that time period probably actually meant something more like white person with black hair and eyes.

Later on, it says the daimyo thought Yasuke's skin looked like it was covered in black paint, which makes it more likely he was actually African, but I'm still not totally convinced.
It depends if you find it acceptable that the work you created gets assigned the AGPL license. However, this problem was already solved at this point, so it's a non-issue these days.

One practical problem, even for developers who are fine with licensing their code to whatever open source license is easiest, is that not all open source licenses are AGPL compatible. Take for example the Mozilla Public License, which is inherently incompatible with AGPL because of the terms imposed; this means that any project using MPL licensed libraries could no longer be linked with Mold.

License incompatibilities can be a huge pain (see: ZFS + Linux). If you develop software for yourself this isn't a problem, but if you intend to distribute your software this becomes more of an issue.

This is probably also the main reason why normal linkers/compilers don't impose licenses on the produced work.
We used to let the kids watch YouTube videos. But now it’s “daaaaad Ad…” every two minutes. YouTube is now banned on the TV.

And while we’re on this topic: Google’s rockstar elite engineers and designers removed the ability to force a resolution for YouTube + Chromecast. But it also wrongly auto detects my gigabit internet as being too weak so it’s literally impossible to get anything above 480p on my basement TV. (Twitch and others stream in HD without issue)
> I believe that's responsive to your major point

Not really, because while I am talking about how things ought to be, you are talking about how things are. Once again my point: this was evil and the people responsible deserve punishment. Saying they did nothing illegal is irrelevant since, as you say, laws and morality are not equivalent. If you don't believe evil should be punished, then you believe old laws should never change and new ones shouldn't be created. As you say, morality changes, so then why would laws remain unchangeable? How can we ever codify moral standards when people get more upset at outrage than at the immoral act?

There's no legal culpability in this case, but if society follows your lead there wouldn't be legal culpability in any future cases either. Next time an article reveals Johnson & Johnson has been knowingly putting poison in its baby powder or something like that, will you once more argue against the outrage and claim there's no legal culpability and the consumers could have been testing their baby powder, so really it's their fault?

> available within the body of scientific knowledge, based on the evidence I provided

Not really, the evidence you provided only said people knew CO2 could heat the world, but nothing about its effects on mankind (which Exxon did know about, per the previous leaks). And as you admit, you can't know if any voter or policy-maker actually knew. So how are we responsible for allowing Exxon's actions again?

I'm finished with this discussion, your nihilism is exhausting.
I'd argue passive consumption of content is worse then playing video games. I have no horses in this race, I admittedly spend way too much time streaming content. But at least with games you're doing something. Actively using your brain. There are studies showing games can improve dexterity and problem solving abilities. I doubt watching stuff does the same.
Looks like this could be translated into a SAT problem and solved with a SAT solver. Have you tried that?
My point exactly. If they survived those harsh falls, I doubt they're in any danger anytime soon.
Thanks. This sounds interesting.

Can you give a bit more colour on "notionalizing" and "isomorphically faking" please.
> "I may not know what cos(x) means, but whatever it is shouldn't depend on what OS version I'm running"

Cosine is a terrible example to use for that idea. It's pretty likely to change, for certain x, in similar circumstances to your examples of "when test results should never change".
I think fax modems had 14.4 kbps bandwidth but I'm sure that chip he used has enough dsp horsepower to implement the modem.
>notionalize data (think isomorphically faking data)

Are these just $5 words for setting a fake data flag on the records?
yes you can do so with a canary tier . assuming your code is well instrumented to distinguish performance and quality regressions , a canary tier served to customers will catch more regressions than synthetic testing