skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see so much angst here, an awful lot of it hinging around:

* it’s a language and technical thing so human emotions and feelings don’t matter HTFU

* there’s a race and diversity aspect and anything that has to do with race and diversity offends me HTFU

Or some variant.

These are people doing stuff they’re passionate about. You may be an end user and don’t care about the internal politics, but for these folks it’s a group of humans working together with all the emotional complexities of such things. It’s more like a job for them than a technical project - with all the HR issues those entail. If you’ve ever worked on a standards effort it’s even more the human complexity roller coaster than a job. Add in they’re a bunch of socially maladjusted nerds, and the thresholds for drama are lower and the ability to navigate is even worse.

So, I think empathy for those who are hurt and their reasons isn’t uncalled for. Hearing the other side would be useful too.

On the race and diversity side: having a black person give a key note at a conference of this technical depth would be good. Arguing it shouldn’t matter doesn’t consider black engineers in a field where there are no peers like them that are visible. In your life where you’re surrounded by people like you everywhere you go it’s likely hard to understand directly, but as a nerd remember when you were in middle school and you just wished for one other person who loved assembler as much as you. That scratches the surface of the feeling of exclusion minority engineers feel - except it didn’t end in middle school, it happens every day in every interaction. Then when someone dares say “hey yeah I get you,” they get shouted down for “making it political,” which sounds an awful lot like “I don’t like black people standing up for themselves” to black peoples ears - further isolating them. I’m sorry you find that inconvenient and you feel like it shouldn’t matter. But as the person who doesn’t fit in and is made to remember that in situations and discussions like this, it’s bound to hurt. Hence, hence the emotions of hurt and betrayal on display.
You should be aware that Coingeek is a propaganda site for a known charlatan. Any claim that Wright invented bitcoin should give it away immediately. His claims have been repeatedly, cryptographically proven false, for close to 10 years now:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/11/bitco...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are...

He is trying to use courts around the world to bully bitcoin developers into writing code that gives him 1.1 million bitcoin for free. So of course he'd like to spread the idea that governments have control over it.

Jesse Powell's point was not that governments can control bitcoin - it was that governments can control exchanges under their jurisdiction. Kraken cannot seize your coins if you keep them in self-custody. Kraken is not responsible for you - you are responsible for yourself.
i made the mistake of buying an hp piece of junk as my latest printer, as it looked like it was an update of an old model from samsung i liked.

it didn't even surpass the duration of the included toner. what an awful piece of hardware. super slow wifi scans, continued nagging about low toner, hard to acquire compatibles due to the "security chip".

switched to a brother, seems way better but time will tell. in any case I think this is my last all-in-one, probably a scanner and a small laser printer are better bets in the long term. space and automatic document feeder are important tho
Good god, things get better when people advocate for themselves aka griping.
> I’m old[ish], and wasn’t hired, explicitly because of that.

I've been involved in a lot of hiring and I have zero doubt that you were subject to ageism. It's odd to me that discrimination based on age is somehow ok.

Not only that, what the fuck are you trying to prevent by doing so? Experienced candidates?
I'm a Venetian since 2020, and I can say that I know a bit about these engineering and environmental issues.

First, the €5.5B cost of the MOSE is mostly due to corruption. Several people have been investigated, and some condemned, but it's pretty clear to everyone that as much as 2/3rd of the cost can be attributed in one way to another to corruption.

Second, no one in Venice is talking about raising the city by pumping something in its underground. No one.

This whole article is fabricated by finding a couple of obscure academics willing to imagine a weird, unlikely scenario.

There is no political will nor agreement on what to do to fight sea level rising. At least for the moment.

Despite all of this, I love being here, and I hope I'll be able to enjoy the city for the next few decades. Maybe some fancy and intelligent solution will show up eventually, down the road. I'm not too hopeful.
Why is marriage is a prerequisite to children? As far as I can tell, being unmarried or even single doesn’t prevent pregnancy.
Nerd Vittles is alive and well. And Incredible PBX now offers dozens of free, turnkey platforms. Have a look at wiki.incrediblepbx.com for suggestions.
> even USian anthropologists (roughly) agree with me

But also note that the position of the AAA is not that racial inequality does not exist at all (and therefore should not be spoken of, as seems to be your position); their position is that it exists on social, rather than biological, grounds:

> we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances
100% agree.

However, seeing how excited Palantir is with their war assistant LLM , the US testing autonomous fighter jets a few months ago, etc. I think there's a decent chance that AI won't even have to break out of its constraints. It's pretty much guaranteed people are going to do the obviously dumb thing and give it capabilities it shouldn't have or is not equipped to deal with safely.
> reduce immigration, mass deportation of illegals saving trillions of dollars in education and other costs

That is actually going to drive home construction rates though the roof. Part of the labor shortage in construction is a result of reduced illegal immigration. Who could ever tell by the day laborers standing in front of Home Depot that illegal immigration was so entangled with construction?

> end the green energy initiatives that are costing the state billions,

So cede the entire green energy to China? Smart, it would also solve our illegal immigration problem as the USA would be less desirable economically.
Can't really teach kids that are dead or with teachers that are dead.

Kids can catch up. I think people perceive the less than 2 years of remote school that these kids are irreversibly behind in some huge proportion.

The good benefit of not dying easily outweighs the bad effect of a slightly less optimal education for a brief period of time.
I wonder if it relates to the decline in fertility in the last few decades. Is having kids a motivation for marriage? Could it be the other way around?
If you're leaving the community anyway, does it matter if you violate the CoC through being honest about your opinions?
> one would hope would reduce your chances of dying or becoming disabled.

The point of the comment you're replying to is to explain that didn't happen.
> Rationality’s building blocks are themselves not rational. I don’t know where this idea came from that logical thought somehow springs into life fully formed at once.

Certainly not from me :-P
I'm fully aware that human rationality is one technique trained on top of our common diffuse thinking. Heck, we invented machines to perform rational steps for us without errors.

Once you build a consistent rational system though, you can trust that it will always produce internally coherent knowledge (as long as no bugs external to the system are introduced). That behaviour requires algorithms, not statistical inference.
Unfortunately, I'm not so sure there's a quick fix for this.

Both nuclear, water and gas have the advantage that they're pretty massive and can store energy while they rotate. In the past, these systems were great for the grid because they kept on spinning and were hard to slow down. So, when there was a big load on the grid, like when an industrial plant fired up a huge device that sucked up lots of power, these giant machines took a while to slow down. That meant they could pump some extra power into the grid, at least for short periods.

The realistic option is probably to expand solar and wind power and also set up hydro pumps for storing energy. Alongside that, also invest in SMR reactors and supercapacitor to handle sudden spikes in grid demand.
Don Bateman, inventor of the GPWS, has died
Yeah. There were areas in the US (parts of Texas, Los Angeles County, New York) where the system did start to collapse, even with lockdowns and warnings. It likely would have been much worse without them. It likely would have been much better if folks had taken the warnings more seriously. Most didn't.

Oh how we forget!

I had a business acquaintance in Florida that went from 'COVID is all liberal propaganda', to literally almost dead in the hospital (they had to induce a Coma in him for 2 weeks), to 'I almost died, holy fuck, it's real' all in the space of a month last year.

And an in-law that almost died of it a year and a half ago in Spain, requiring a week in the ICU. He kept insisting it wasn't COVID even after his family had all tested positive (and he refused being tested) until he woke up in the middle of the night and realized he was dying (his words).

Luckily they had figured out the anti-inflammatory treatment at that point, or he likely would have been dead.
I highly recommend the NOVA episode "Saving Venice" on this topic. MOSE is a marvel of engineering and makes me feel proud to be human.

https://www.pbs.org/video/saving-venice-zq9di2/
As I said, the argument for this being an ethically appropriate approach can be made from a Utilitarian or Consequentialist view point. That view becomes complicated by the difficulty of knowing what would have happened had alternative decisions been made (others have debated that point ad infinitum). It’s a partial knowledge problem.

It’s not my point though. Regardless of the actual trade in lives and human suffering between the two alternatives, a deontological viewpoint judges the rightness of an action by the action itself - no matter the outcome.

So that’s my point. The bombing of civilians (whatever the prevailing norms, and no matter the consequences), is always wrong, and can never be justified on the grounds of “it shortened the war“ or “it would have saved millions of lives”.

However, it’s not a simple and clear cut argument, and perhaps it can be justified in other ways. I reject the utilitarian arguments, but I’m open to considering other justifications.
418 is a class 4xx error, which means the client erred and shouldn't repeat the request as-is. That is, any unrecognized error beginning with a 4 must be handled as if it were the base error class, 400, "Bad Request".

> the server cannot or will not process the request due to something that is perceived to be a client error (for example, malformed request syntax, invalid request message framing, or deceptive request routing).
The when is harder to know. If it’s possible then we need to figure out alignment first (which currently doesn’t look promising).

People are famously bad at predicting when right up until they have already done it.

“In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.

“In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.

“And of course if you’re not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then.”

https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
I was trying to be generous! But you are of course right, in the better analogy Hawking would find himself born into a feline-centric world and face an even harder task.
China state-sponsored cyber actor living off the land to evade detection [pdf]
I've started to use chatGPT4 as a major part of my routine healthcare. I can comfortably ask question I want at my pace to really probe each symptom and likely cause, tailored to me. Easily better than most general practitioners I've had.
... and here is the previous thread on HN (623 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109842
A friend of mine, Venetian by birth, says that he thinks Venice is the "city of the future", even more than a city of the past.
Bro wtf is happening at rust. How does a programming language have this much drama WEEKLY
Bad play Rust

Declining a keynote because you disagree with it just works to highlight a lack of welcoming of diverse viewpoints in the community. Having a perspective highlighted you disagree with would actually show how open and welcoming the community is.

This assumes of course the person was not making promises on behalf of the project to the community (who knows maybe they were?) but rather expressing their own opinions.

Having a keynote is not some endorsement that this is the future direction of the project.
No mention of long-term downward pressure from immigration and outsourcing.
The comment you're responding too was wondering why more wealthy people aren't building well-regarded social legacies. Not why rich people weren't solving society's issues.

> How many problems could have been solved with $32 trillion

How many problems were solved with that $32 trillion?

To nitpick, the current US GDP estimate is $26.49 trillion. https://www.bea.gov/news/2023/gross-domestic-product-second-...

In general, I agree with your gist. Hagiographies turn me off, particularly in a republic of citizens (not Great Men).
The obvious tongue-in-cheek follow-on - combine with lab-grown meat to get 'long pork' made of anybody you want. An enemy. A pop star. And so on.
I agree with the description, but it does make me wonder why we don't see this stuff out of South Korea as well. They also have similar compulsory military service, but seem to mostly be producing starcraft players, k-drama and pop stars.
First, the entire moderator team (BurntSushi et el) resigned citing inappropriate actions of a Rust core team member (details were not made public). Now JT resigns for a similar reason. Rust project governance has been a problem for a while and it seems to be getting worse.
Now following Activ8te on SoundCloud!
Considering Elon an "effective leader" is certainly a take.
This is complete historical revisionism. For basically the entire time that schools were remote and weeks after, any time a school tried to open so many teachers became sick that operating the school became infeasible. It was a choice between sick and dead teachers (and some children) with unknown future consequences and schools shut down without staff, or schools shut down to do remote schooling with significantly lower mortality rates. We saw what your proposed solution did when the policies were abandoned; millions of people died and are still dying, and life expectancy in the US is still 2-6 years below what it was four years ago. That has wiped out 20-40 years of improvements to life expectancy in the US, depending on the population under discussion.
> Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?
I mentioned these as you said “do whatever you think is best” and to contrast with the workflow of a mechanic. I’m not doing whatever I think is best I’m doing what the body of evidence thinks is best, adjusting to specific patient circumstances.

As an aside the “agenda” of these authorities is to ensure we practice safely (i.e. evidence based medicine) in the interest of patient care and not based off our own personal gain or thoughts (as you posited with the mechanic analogy). An example of a sanctionable offense is performing an unnecessary procedure because it pays well, like in your mechanic example.

Where there is no compelling evidence, or when there are unique patient circumstances, I practice with more latitude (e.g. I commonly biopsy lesions that don’t need one when it’s causing patient anxiety and the risks are low, despite not adhering to guidelines, and have no fear of being sanctioned as it is justifiable as reducing anxiety/for the patient’s mental wellness. What I can’t do and will be sanctioned is if I unnecessarily biopsy a benign incidental lesion for the $90).

With respects to insurance and pharmaceuticals I couldn’t care less what their interests are. As part of my job I fight with them routinely and we take industry funded evidence with a grain of salt.

The primary guiding interest in any patient encounter is unequivocally the patient’s health. We are explicitly instructed (and obligated) to disregard systems-level issues and concerns in patient encounters.

COVID is a perfect example of why science-based medicine doesn’t work as the response was not evidence based at all, largely because it’s impossible to acquire evidence during a pandemic.

As someone who was critical of the response, you’re right that the authorities limited us (not that I practice primary care) but that period of time was the medical equivalent of martial law. This has been the only period in my lifetime where medical practice was dictated by an authority to such a degree.

Mistakes will happen in exceptional circumstances, most medical encounters are not exceptional. We are also all human.

Pointing out rare exceptions doesn’t disprove the validity of evidence-based medicine or provide evidence of its corruption.
Or "y'all", or "youse", or lots of other variants. But there's no standard, is the thing.
> But then I started dating someone who grew up in the south (Georgia and Texas) and I've been exposed to many country songs, spanning many decades

It's a big, big genre. And the lines between it, blues, and rock are often blurred.
In general I'd agree, yet now that I married later and had kids later I think I waited too long. Emotional maturity can come with age and yet some younger folks with more experience or better mentors were years ahead of me.

Sometimes I wish there were pre-child counseling focused on helping parents strategize before they're pregnant -- or at least before children are born.

Regardless, folks need to do the math, especially if considering having many kids. And still consider their bodies aren't getting any younger or lives and longer.
Here is the problem people are having with this

Maggie Appleton on this blog literally says "Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web".

I have a Dark Forest Theory of Hacker News. If I stay out of certain threads i dont get blasted. So i dont post in them. Hacker News is like Liu Cixin's dark forest.

i hope someone would say "as Fatneckbeard pointed out, HN is a lot like Liu Cixin's Dark Forest" not "Fat Neck Beards's Dark Forest theory of Hacker News".

I did not write 1000+ pages of books about this that became a world wide best seller and responsible for the phrase being a house hold word. I just pointed out they are similar. It is not my idea. It is not even my adaptation of an idea to a novel context. Im just pointing out something relatively obvious, because the original book is widely interpreted as an analogy for China's 996 tech startup culture by the Chinese readership which made it a success in the first place, so I'm basically making a pop culture reference. Even if I wrote a blog about it it would not make it my idea.
Well other languages are just programing languages, they are not virtuous like Rust. And I am not just overstating it. In so many contexts Rust people come swinging at whoever not using or competing with Rust, are not just making bad technical choice (still debatable) but morally lacking.
If these pumps ever stop, part of Germany floods
There was a period of time where the political rhetoric was definitely going in that direction. If I remember correctly, it was when Trump was trying to get it fast tracked before the election and people were freaking out about that. Which, given the circumstances, is kind of understandable.

Personally, I read the study data for it (and for some of the other 150+ vaccines that had been attempted), and figured I'd go for it when it was available. Which took forever.
The Physics of ‘Sniping’ for Gold
TIL

SAR = Specific Absorption Rate

From the FCC's SAR testing page:

> SAR testing uses standardized models of the human head and body that are filled with liquids that simulate the RF absorption characteristics of different human tissues. In order to determine compliance, each cell phone is tested while operating at its highest power level in all the frequency bands in which it operates, and in various specific positions against the dummy head and body, to simulate the way different users’ typically hold a cell phone, including to each side of the head. To test cell phones for SAR compliance, the phone is precisely placed in various common positions next to the head and body, and a robotic probe takes a series of measurements of the electric field at specific pinpoint locations in a very precise, grid-like pattern within the dummy head and torso. All data for each phone placement are submitted as a part of the equipment approval test report for final authorization. However, only the highest SAR values for each frequency band are included in the final authorization to demonstrate compliance with the FCC’s RF guidelines.
I would definitely like to see those studies broken down by how happy the marriages are. Somehow I doubt it's accurate for married couples who are constantly at each others' throats.
I think that's mostly true. The rise of New Atheism seemed to coincide with the start of decreased tolerance. Coincidence or cause, I'm not sure.
https://archive.ph/9IKDe
It's a smart move on their part to bake this in, as they have a pretty large brand with a good distribution channel.

I saw this sentiment somewhere on HN or Twitter, but the recent generative AI advancements will (in the short term) benefit companies that can get this tech in the most hands in the shortest possible time with the least amount of friction.

That is Google's moat.
A dam at gibraltar to control the level of the sea (2014)
Wouldn't that be selection bias?

Presumably Married people at that stage are there because they work together not because there's just someone else there.
SAR Values are useless because of what they measure and how they measure them.

First, they are only concerned about thermal changes and it is well know now that RF-EMFs have non-thermal effects on biology(1).

Second, the SAR levels were set using non-pulsed EMFs, and that makes a difference in the biology of RF-EMFs effects(2).

(1) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.1201/97810032...

(2) https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/59/5/92