skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Years back I read a number of books by people who walked or biked around the world. Thoughts (these are from memory long ago):

Dave Kunst [1] [2]: Possibly the first person to walk around the world in the early '70s. His book was a slog and he came across as a bitter and dark person. I didn't like being in his head at all. Examples: he enjoyed when people tried to walk with him and they found it difficult to keep up. He was married I think at the start of the walk, and just told his wife/partner: I'm leaving to walk around the world, deal with it. He walked for UNICEF, but in the book it was phrased as something like: I knew I'd never be able to afford the trip, so getting a sponsor was the best way forward.

Barbara Savage [3]: Biked around the world with her husband in the '70s. They saved to buy a house, but decided to bike the world instead. They were pretty competent but had their fair share of incidents. An enjoyable trip with fun people.

Lloyd Sumner [4]: The king of crazy experiences. He rode a bike around the world in the early '70s. He started off from the American south on a Schwinn with a couple hundred dollars in his pocket and a vague plan. He stopped to lecture on generating computer art with school mainframes when he ran out of money, got chased by an ostrich, almost married by accident, stranded on an island after a shipwreck, and more. An absolute delight.

There are two others that I can't remember/find now: a group of young men bicycled long distance in the '80s but didn't think to have fat tires or a light load: one of them packed a portable typewriter, another a full camera kit with many lenses. They carried over 100 pounds of gear on skinny tires and got something like 20 flats per day at times.

And a guy walked around the world in the '80s, all I remember is that he didn't pack well for the journey from France into Spain and almost froze in the Pyrenees.

1. https://www.amazon.com/man-who-walked-around-world/dp/068803...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kunst
3. https://www.amazon.com/Miles-Nowhere-Round-Bicycle-Adventure...
4. https://www.amazon.com/long-ride-Lloyd-Sumner/dp/0811709523
Serious browser exploits are extremely rare these days. Like, the worst you get is cryptocurrency mining while you're on the page.
'StopTheFonts' is new Safari extension to block custom web fonts
While it's tempting to see free will as self-evident, scientific evidence suggests that our actions are determined by a complex interplay of genetics, environment, and prior experiences. Dismissing this perspective as edgy or hubristic risks ignoring important insights into human behavior. Recognizing the absence of free will can foster empathy and compassion, as we become more aware of the factors that contribute to human choices and behaviors.
It's essentially the question of free will.

There is a case that everything we do is preordained. A result of forces and interactions that trace all the way back to big bang.

My choice on whether or not I reply to you doesn't exist. Your combination of words triggers a response in my brain that makes me type this combination of words. The words I "chose" to delete, rewrite, leave, are all a result of various forces.

The kicker is that we can't really know. There is no test for free will. In order to know whether or not I had a choice to do this, we'd have to run the entire universe again up to that point to see what I would do. Because experience matters. Even if this exact same post went up tomorrow with all the same response except for mine. The fact that it's now Thursday instead of Wednesday matters. The fact that I posted this today matters. What I had for lunch. How fast I drank my coffee. What shirt I wore. Etc. These are all things that change the conditions under which I will engage with the post.

The second kicker is that it doesn't matter. If free will truly does not exist, it's not like you have a choice in whether or not to believe in it. The arguments either will work or they won't.
Ask HN: How to deal with OCD/decision paralysis?
I suffer from bouts of OCD that cause me to get stuck on small decisions that I spend far too much time researching and debilitating on. Some examples include:

- Spending too much time deciding what to name my source code directory/home directory layout.

- Spending two days deciding if I should put personal scripts in my dotfiles repo or make a separate repo and agonizing over whether my dot files should assume they are bundled with my personal scripts.

- Rewriting a script/code several times because it doesn't "look" good to me (doesn't visually seem as well written or professional as other code I've read). Spending hours studying every example on the Internet to figure out the exact "right way" to code help text.

- Figuring out where to store patches, what to name git branches, how to write commit messages for small projects.

- Agonizing over color schemes/aesthetic choices.

I have always done well as a software engineer through bouts of extreme productivity, but I then sink into these moments of despair where I'm held back from working on the bigger fish projects I want to work on by my neurotic traits. I'm wondering if any of you suffer from the same issues and have found effective coping strategies. I have tried therapy, but it wasn't effective in changing any of my work behaviors.
Thanks a lot, I was on a path to learn bio/med (there's a coursera bioinformatics minimooc too).

Anybody in computational biology btw ? slack, irc.
For some idea sourcing, you guys could consider mapping to musical notes as well. Then each melody maps to a particular dance.
His assistants are probably better employed doing research than messing round with spreadsheets. And the secretary might then not have the necessary competence for such a task. And if they employed a person for just such tasks, they would have loads of downtime.
He'd be a seriously bad professor if he wasted the time of the people he was supposed to be teaching with copying badly formatted data for a talk.
I'm asking because I've sort of done this in the past, and find creating fragments of HTML with Django's template engine a bit awkward.

For instance, if I have some sort of utility button, and say I put it in "utility_button.html", a template file. In practice, I might have to supply different actions, or icon names, or colors when the button is generated, which means that each of these potential variable needs to be a template parameter. Adding a class involves some string manipulation magic.

On the other hand, on most client-side front end library, when using a template, I can still slap whatever attributes onto the element, or manipulate its classes as an actual list with relative ease, because front end libraries are more or less already a big HTML parser and generator.
I find it rather strange that people tend to blame the famine on communism and central planning
This is why I was concerned when I heard Google, of all companies, released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out. I'm curious what happened with this effort. It's not exactly a vote of confidence when the other guy trying to do this is Bill Gates.
The Haves and Have-Nots of the Metaverse: Virtual Landloard
my chromecast absolutely can turn the TV off (seems like standard cec stuff no?)

I use it all the time to turn the tv off via google assistant when I walk out of the house
It does disclose it... this is at the end of the article:

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. NPR's Bobby Allyn and Mary Yang contributed to this story. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

What more do you want?
...then hang out with your friends in real life?
The Metaverse is another name for a new kind of interface: glasses. If the interface gets good enough then everything else will follow.
Not quite: once you've paid for a version for twelve consecutive months you get a perpetual license to that version. If you unsubscribe you keep your perpetual licenses.
Have you used a TV in the last? Don’t you miss the larger screen and not having to squint when there’s some tiny text within the show that’s hard to read on small screens etc?
>And that raises the question of which criminals to put in jail which makes it much harder.

Why is this hard? Is there a problem with speeding that is lowering quality of life to the degree that violent, property, drug and homeless loitering is in major cities? Cmon man, we are all smart people here. The manufactured moral dilemmas are such a waste of time.

We can all conceive of hierarchies of crime, and right now unenforcement is the major problem so are we really at risk of jumping to extremes where speeding tickets lands someone in jail for a long time? Now, if speeding results in physical harm or car accidents, then at the very least those breaking them should lose their license. If that becomes an issue, then escalate until the problem is solved to a degree that makes a city a pleasant place to live. Maybe the problem is there are too many competing defintions here for what people think is desirable for a city..but open drug use, homeless/mentally ill squatting on sidewalks and harassing people, un-punished property and violent crime, mass theft at retail businesses etc seem fairly obvious to me maybe you have a different preference and like this stuff.

>Addiction is lifelong so you're going to put drug addicts in jail you would need to use a life sentence.

Yea maybe. I'd rathr have a nice clean city than concern myself with rehabilitation of hard drug users. Getting hooked on this stuff already means one has ruined their own life. Why do we have to allow them to ruin ours too?

Close your heart to sentimentality, or maybe direct that sentimentality to the people doing the right thing, not using drugs and trying to be productive citizens. Where is the empathy for them? This is the major blocker to solving these problems. I feel much worse for the good citizens who have to suffer living around this mess, than anyone addicted to drugs and whose behavior necessitates removing them from society so the rest of us can get on with our lives unomolested.

This mentality of hyper sympathy for what are essentially mindless zombies wreaking havoc (at some point the drugs preclude people from rational thought) is the core of why US cities have become so bad. It may be true that to clean up the streets requires abandoning the aversion to harsh punishments for these and other people. If collectively we cannot cross that chasm, then we're doomed to live in filth that will only get worse.
It's divisible down to 0.00000001.

If that ever became a significant issue I imagine users would be happy to increase the precision via a fork.

LN supports sub satoshi (i.e. higher precision) payments on L2.

If you're talking about the numbers getting super small and being unwieldy, most fiat currencies have the opposite problem of the numbers getting super large, they just redenominate every now and then.
Overcast (Marco Arment's podcast app for iOS) did something similar.

Originally it was an ad-free freemium app. A one-time IAP unlocked premium features (£2.99).

Then all features we made free for all users. (People who already paid were no worse off.)

Then ads were added, even for people who had paid the one-off £2.99 early on. The only way to get rid of them is to pay an annual subscription fee.

The amounts are small, and the app is great. It's not easy to keep everyone happy and build a sustainable business at the same time.
> What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app

I really think we're just waiting for the resolution to increase and it to become thinner and lighter and better at hand tracking.

The Quest 2 is already a better experience watching 1080p surround-sound content than most people's TV's -- if you're watching by yourself. But streamers haven't quite caught onto that yet.

But once the screen becomes sharp enough to do real work and hand tracking improves dramatically, I think we're going to start seeing some dramatic shifts.
> Minecraft is limited by a single thread, but some stuff does run on other threads

Hmm, not so outdated. if you’re talking about JVM gc then sure but pretty much everything is built around a single thread ticking the mod. I know some mods can do chunk pregen on another thread but those are rarely used.
It's partially cultural. At some point I realized that when American friends say "I've watched that", they more often than not mean it was running off to the side or in the background while they were doing other tasks. Previously I was mystified why anyone would watch certain type of content that wouldn't be able to hold anyone's attention span.

It seems quite common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretches of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal, and TVs have no place outside the living room.

This is to say the use case different folks have for TVs also varies widely. Now, when I do sit down at the TV, I generally appreciate the nice big screen.
Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's the last thing we need, and fortunately is particularly avoidable.

Fortunately your other recent comments have all been good HN posts—thank you!
> Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding?

Are SpaceX or Tesla news organizations?
> mining requires special devices (ASICs)

Profitable mining does. If you’re looking to make money, you need ASICs. If you’re just looking to disrupt the network, e.g. for military purposes, commandeering a cloud or two would do.
Because the units are highly divisible and the divisibility can be increased easily if it becomes necessary.

When someone loses/destroys bitcoin, they are effectively donating the value to everyone else who still holds bitcoin.
Very much agree with this one, but would phrase it as using = to represent assignment was the bad original choice.
Infinitely divisible
> Never figured out how to use Hertzner. Wanted to try since they get such a good reputation on here, but they banned my account when their system presented no way for me to verify my identity.

I ran into the same thing as well, maybe my real name sounds a bit funny to their system? It was very discouraging to move forward after being instantly banned. I reached out to them how I could verify and the only way was sending them an unencrypted mail with my Passport copy. Upon request they suggested I could simply send them a fax.

Note, this has been some years ago and I've never gave Hetzner a new try. As long as I can see from professional experience, you will have a lot of back and forth with Hetzner support, which becomes quite bad the moment your team is international because they'll always manage to sneak in some sort of German text. It really feels antiquated having to go through support for basic server hardware debugging. Eventually they'll often resort to replacing your instance.
Why not just use GFM?

Item | Cost
-------------- | -------------
Rent | $1500
Utilities | $200
Groceries | $360
Transportation | $450
Entertainment | $120
**Total** | `=SUM(B2:B6)`

https://github.github.com/gfm/#tables-extension-

Getting rid of the vertical divider is nice but I'd rather think of it as a tiny modification to GFM than a distinct language.

Putting the in backquotes could make it look more like a formula and also it could be required for formulas to prevent accidentally invoking it.

It really is nice to have the horizontal bar gone, though. I think I might make my own format based on it. I tried to get rid of the bar but saw that you can't. In fact the only way you can have everything on one side of the bar is to only have a header (thead) when it would often be useful to only have a body (tbody).

FWIW original markdown requires pipes at the start and end of each row but not GFM.
It is pretty crazy you can turn down the sound but not the picture on almoost every TV
> The Metaverse was always such a bad direction.

Sure, but VR isn't, they're different things. For VR they've sold somewhere around 15-20 million headsets, and many people use it quite a bit. I have no doubt VR is/will be big, but the path to finding what's compelling in VR will be strange. Personlly I rediscovered a love for table tennis and play every single day now, I'd probably pay $2-3k for a Quest 2 if I had no choice.

That said I think trying to build the "Metaverse" in a top-down way will be very difficult, and Meta will probably not be the ones pulling it off since they don't have much good will, people actively avoid their social platforms if they can. But to me, what we need is not a Metaverse, but a good OS/platform with integrated social/identity, where friends can easily join each other's games, voice is enabled by default and provided as part of platform, not individual apps etc. Meta has been working on making this easier, but with my friends group the friction is still too high. And it's super annoying when third party apps (like Rec Room) needs their own login, friends/social features etc making it cumbersome to find your friends in there.
It should be labeled as such considering it has received massive tax breaks and free rent from the City and County of San Francisco.
At one company we had one-off requests to run get some statistics from our mongodb.

Writing the proper queries proven pretty tricky whenever GROUP BY/JOINs were involved, so I used online converters between SQL -> mongo query.

But then I realized that PostgreSQL has nice JSONB type (supports indices for subfields). So I put all the mongo data into tables with a single JSONB column (or two columns id+data, if you prefer).

Turned out that was much faster to run analytical queries :)

"document" is just row

"collection" is just table
I very recently purchased a MacBook Pro (M1 Max) with 64GB of ram. I haven't experimented that much, but I was able to run inference using the 65B parameter Llama model with quantized weights at a speed that was reasonably usable (maybe a touch slower than ChatGPT with GPT-4).

I haven't attempted to use the 65B model with non-quantized weights, but the smaller models work that way, if slowly. With 96GB of ram -- the upper limit of a MacBook Pro -- you might be able to use even larger models, but I think you'd hit the limits of useful performance before that point.

I should note that it can be a bit tricky getting things to work using the Mac's GPU. I couldn't get Dolly 6B to run on my work MBP, which theoretically should have enough ram, though I still want to try it on my personal laptop.
> It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal.

I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person and I think the value in something like Bitcoin is as a backup or alternative to the traditional system. Similar to how someone would invest in gold. Except Bitcoin is much easier to transfer, requires much less space to store, etc., vs gold. I think 95% of crypto is bullshit though, and there are a lot of scams.

If you look at recent bank collapses, high inflation, etc., I think a reasonable person might question how long modern monetary theory can go on like this. I'm not a gloom and doom person. I still hold fiat, haven't given up on banks, still invest in US treasuries, stocks, etc. But I think holding some in crypto and gold, etc., also makes sense.
I'm saying that technically, yes, they are receiving state funds, regardless of amount, and if the label is going to be applied then it should be applied to all company accounts receiving government subsidies, Exxon and others included.

My stance is that if twitter, youtube, and the likes are going to be using these labels on accounts, then they should apply them to all organizations universally without bias/singling out of individual industries. Either apply across the board going by a technical definition, or don't apply them at all.
> I don't think it's a given that Canada and Canadians will be tolerant, open minded, welcoming, friendly - and indeed, many people underneath their veneer, are not.

A lot of Québécois have stories of relatives being arrested without probable cause by the RCMP during the october crisis of 1970. Some of us have indigenous friends whose parents were in the residential school system. A lot of us have witnessed unconstitutional arrests during g20 protests in Toronto in 2011 or in Québec in 2012 go unpunished for the politicians who ordered them and the cops who carried them out (it's literally kidnapping).

Canada is a corporatocracy. Read Alain Denault's books. Canada acts as a legal shelter for natural ressource extraction companies that commit crimes in developing countries. A lot of the big markets in the country (groceries, telecom, etc.) are full on oligopolies that are protected by the government. This country is part of the british empire and when you pull back the veneer of politeness and decency you see a very violent country.
RISC-V Driving New Verification Concepts
I can't speak to this particular paper, but the field of NLP is full of these kinds of tasks, it's in some sense a historical accident of where LLMs originated.

These tasks are all noisy, all pretty messy, but the interesting part here is not that performance improves on these constructed tasks -- NLP researchers have been improving performance on constructed tasks for decades, by customizing models and curating datasets.

Rather, the interesting part is that performance improves despite no specific model or data shifts except for scale.

It seems that you're arguing two things: first, that these tasks aren't that interesting -- on that we agree. But, second, that it's obvious that performance would improve on arbitrary tasks because of memorization and an unknown training set -- but this is easy to validate: make up a new constructed task, and see how it performs.
It's a well-founded concern, too. Every new wave has a cacophony of people demanding it change to work exactly like Twitter so they don't have to learn anything new or change, dooming them to experience exactly what they left if they got their way.

It reminds me of how Metro Atlanta has grown. People move out a bit to get away from Atlanta traffic. Then they miss all the stuff they had in Atlanta, and start clamoring for all they miss from where they moved from. It often starts with a Target or a movie theater. Ten years on, they're complaining about Atlanta traffic again, and they move. And the cycle repeats until half of North Georgia is consumed by a web of crumbling asphalt roads dangling off packed highways.

The difference here is Mastodon, as a community, said "No. Learn a new way or buzz off." Most people buzz off, and occasionally complain about how hostile the community was to them to anyone who'll listen. Some people stick around and appreciate the different way of doing things. Repeat.
I've already noted that when you select text on substack, it shows a popover with a "ReStack Quote" button. I think when any blogging platform — medium does this as well — shows a popover when you select text, it's over. Selecting text is such a natural mechanic, there are so many reasons you might want to select text, I often even do it to "play" with the text, or to focus on a specific part.
Because it's done server side so that the minimal size can be sent to the client whilst also aiming to get maximum quality. It means you don't always have to send the largest highest image to every user, you can just send the most efficient/appropriate image. i.e. If you wanted a thumbnail of a massive image and it was done client side then you'd have to send that massive image even if it wasn't needed.