skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This whole thing seems just crazy to me. Here's how I imagine Reddit dying.

Day 0: The API is shut off / too expensive / whatever.

Day 1: Moderators leave because their tools / apps were taken away, or because they were removed from their position by administrators.

Day 2-365: Popular communities end up having more and more flamewars / low-quality comments / off-topic posts, etc. A second tier of moderators filled the power vacuum, but they aren't as good as the original moderators. They mostly stepped up to fulfill their desire to control, not their desire to curate and nurture.

Day 366-500: The average user realizes they don't enjoy reading the subreddits they used to frequent. All the comments are mean and all the posts are off-topic. Their comments don't get upvoted. They stop posting, but keep lurking, occasionally.

Day 500: The average user realizes, after refreshing r/all whenever they're bored and having nothing interesting come up, they don't need to visit Reddit anymore.

Day 530: The first derivative of active user count trends below zero.

Day 1000: "An update on Reddit: it's been an amazing journey."

I don't care about Reddit that much (but do read it nearly every day), and I think this is the dumbest thing they could possibly do. If people work for you for free, you do everything you can to make them happy. Let them use their ad-blocker. Let them trumpet a random social cause once a year. Do not touch. It's a sensitive balance; without curation, your whole site dies. You can't make decisions that piss off the curators and creators.

I think you have a little more leeway with the lurkers. It would probably have been more profitable and less harmful to just charge every user a 1-time $5 fee. It's a tested model (hello Metafilter), and it doesn't change anyone's day-to-day. At this point, it's too late, people will burn the headquarters to the ground if you suggest it... but it could have worked if you just needed cash.

Some random off-topic thoughts:

1) The reason people need third-party apps is because the first-party app is terrible. How many years has "new Reddit" been a thing, and the video player still doesn't work? Why does clicking on the page outside of the comment-composition textarea cancel writing a comment? Like do the designers not know that Windows and Linux pass window-focus clicks through to the application (whereas MacOS eats that click)?

2) Reading Reddit during all of this, and most people don't notice or care. That's why this isn't a crisis today; but something that will sloooowly get worse over time as moderators / power users leave the platform. It will be a very slow death, hidden by general user growth (new people being born or whatever) for quite a while. So if things look good to you today, you're not out of the woods.

3) Stop letting the CEO talk and get a different PR department. Elon Musk can be a jerk to everyone because he's the richest person in the world. You are not.
The thing that always struck me most about that passage is the determination to fulfill the lust even after being struck blind and being undeterred and persisting in groping for doorknobs and looking for a way in to Lot's home. If that's an accurate representation I can't imagine how anything other than getting my eyesight back or figuring out what happened to it would not be one's top priority in that moment. It may be a figurative use of the word blind though, like a mirage, or some other confusion ploy, or a mental fog to obscure the entrance somehow.

The throwing the daughters under the bus could have been a declaration of his knowledge of the state of their souls and whatever corruption overtook it by that point. Or it could have been a risky gambit to buy time--when the mob comes I'm sure it's a terrifying experience.
Based on observed behavior, I never believed that was how it actually works there. It seems to actually just be an upvote/downvote system.
I'd say just do them and come up with stuff to do. There are many of non-science forums on psychedelics, and you can quickly get the general idea how they can help you. But if you want to be sciency about it, read the aforementioned journals and do the "stuff" they describe yourself. Compared to experimental compounds, many are very easy (and often legal) to obtain. (but probably not legal to possess)
spez/reddit also totally screwed up the PR by not getting the first word out about the changes. They privately dumped the news on developers who were the ones who had to break to their users that these changes were coming and will make the apps unable to continue operating.

And it was honestly the only thing they could do. Selig has already been over how much of a mess this is causing for people who paid in advance for the app's subscription, and he no longer can offer that service to them. He couldn't just sit quiet and wait for reddit to do the announcement themselves, he's got subscribers on the line. What a colossal fuck-up from reddit. And spez continues to close his eyes and blocked his ears to the idea he might have made a mistake in any of this.
I don't have a percentage for you but agriculture-related futures make up a non-negligible amount of overall trading. It's not just some artificial example. Agricultural futures were also the first futures, and much of today's trading infrastructure was built around agricultural futures. So that's probably part of why it is such a common example.

They are far from the only example. Airlines use futures to hedge against fluctuations in fuel prices. Manufacturers use futures to hedge against fluctuations in the price of input materials. International businesses use FX swaps to hedge against currency fluctuations. Borrowers use interest rate swaps to hedge against interest rate rises. Investment funds (including pension funds and sovereign wealth funds) use options to hedge against drastic movements in asset prices.

I don't really understand your other questions. The use of derivatives in agriculture does not, on balance, result in fewer crops being produced. On the contrary, by allowing farmers to protect themselves against various risk, derivatives markets allow farmers to safely invest more money in production, and reduces the risk of farmers going bankrupt (bankrupt farmers don't produce many crops). Food would almost certainly be more scarce and more expensive if farmers did not have access to the financial markets.
I agree with you regarding p-values. But why are you appealing to credentials and dismissing the idea with your own boldly unsupported claim?

> The causality they're claiming just does not have any physical plausibility.

Survey the literature and you’ll find plenty of evidence that there is some credence to the idea.
Sounds almost expected for anyone stuck in public education for a decade or more would have disdain for anyone talented and/or ambitious enough to get out.
That was childish and unethical, but it did no harm to Reddit or the Reddit brand, and nothing at all to the Reddit bottom line. It hurt Huffman's reputation, but that's it, and the board probably rightly assumed that would more or less blow over.

This is a different beast entirely, he's betting the farm on this API move and keeps doubling down. The damage that's already been done isn't going to go away, and it's damage to Reddit as a whole, not just Huffman personally.
> You are the one associating untrustworthy with LGBT

No, the original commenter made that association implicit by listing the proportional presence of LGBT as a detractor alongside criminals and untrustworthy crewmembers.
Although with binary numbers you'd probably want to modify the rules to avoid rolling so many d20s, since you'd need to re-roll them 12/32=37.5% of the time
A battered Mac PowerBook 170 :)

The CEO, spez, is a founder and YC alumn. His heart is in the right place.

He has to be weighing (a) board pressure to lock down content in the face of its increased value as private ML training data, against (b) the community impact.

He’s betting the (a) training data revenue is higher than the risk of (b) community flight due to (c) the platform-size network effect.

Maybe he’s right. Look at Twitter’s community retention. Maybe not. Look at Twitter’s revenue and Mastodon’s growth.

But if you go earlier back to BBS and the early web, it just never ends well.

I would urge him to look over a broad set of historical case studies and re-evaluate. Still salvageable.
Yeah, its a good habit to have anyways that you turn, you signal at least 3 seconds ahead of time, that way drivers around you can react. Predictability is king on the road.
Nowadays we play The Sims to get that experience.
Three phase is a red herring. No consumer needs to use all three phases to charge their car at home overnight. You’ll wake up to a fully charged car every day on single phase, as the vast majority of us do. Same applies even with the slightly weaker current per phase on continental Europe.

The parts of Europe limited to 25A would still allow for a full overnight charge. The EU voltage is 220V, so 25*220 = 5.5kW. Assuming a 75kWh usable capacity on the Model Y, that means the rare occasions where you’re charging from 0-100% overnight would take 13.6 hours.

The real test of charging hardware is on long journeys where we want to keep the charge time to a minimum, and where Tesla’a NACS 1MW capability is a huge benefit to consumers vs CCS

If you believe the EU’s CCS mandate is a good thing, you’re not paying attention
Every time I read those type of comments from workaholics, I remember the article on top 5 regrets of hospice people [1]. I think that the age to burn the candle is between 18 and 30 or 35 at most. After that,fuck it, people should live their lives with their means, and work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...
It is something that we need to outlaw. All it takes for that to be dangerous is for someone or some groups in competition to give it an overly broad goal like "take control". But also people are stupidly trying to find ways to emulate life in these systems (such as reproductive and self-preservation instincts). Combine that with hyperspeed or hyperIQ AI and you just have to hope to stay on its good side because you cannot possibly keep up with the speed and effectiveness of those systems.
> roughly 50% of time I hit the front-page my posts are taken down

An unanchored percentage doesn't give much information. How many posts have you had taken down for dubious reasons? Were they all from the same mod(s)? Were they controversial to neutral(ish) third-parties?

I've never had a front-page post myself, but I've also only had a single interaction with a mod (that I am aware of) in my entire 10+ years on reddit.
> Where is the productive output of all these arbitrage shell games? How is this more than an abysmal waste of time and resources simply to make a small handful of bankers richer?

If shares of companies are valued at fair prices it means that the finance departments for that companies can raise more capital. So companies that bring value to society should be able to expand their business.

At the same time, regular people can invest in such companies at somewhat fair prices without doing much analysis. Basically, because the profits above the market average have been taken by smarter investors already. But it’s still good to always be able to put money somewhere and receive avg. market returns.
Most local printing places (places that do business cards, flyers, and the like) will gladly supply a quote for a single printed and bound PDF. Last time I did this only had to send the PDF for a complex flight sim. Shop local!
I don't have many doubts in my mind that it was a lab leak.

But then, so what?

Let's say that someone presents irrefutable evidence at these hearings. Not long after you'll start hearing demands for reparations. The US is large, and you can find people that hold all sorts of opinions. Some will claim that it is only just that China needs to pay. One quadrillion dollars.

But then, even if the virus came from a lab leak, it was our own ineptitude that resulted in so many deaths. I remember CNN's Sanjay Gupta telling everyone that you don't need masks, that you only need to wash hands, that it's safe to travel on an airplane. In a show dedicated to educating people about Covid. Did China force him to say these things? By the way, there was nothing special about Gupta, all sorts of medical experts were proclaiming the same falsehoods.

Ok, let's make China pay. But what exactly should they pay for? CDC says that 1.1 million people have died in the US from Covid as of today, and 6.1 million have been hospitalized. How many of these deaths and hospitalizations could have been avoided with a proper government response?

One reasonable response from China could be: in our country only about 120k people have died of Covid, and our population is 4 times higher than yours. With a competent handling of the situation, you could have had only 30k deaths. Less than 3% of the deaths you did have. If you want us to pay reparations, we pay for 3% and you pay for the 97% that your action or inaction caused. How's that?

And of course, China could rightfully point to the fact that the research at the WIV was partially funded by the NIH. Specifically the research that lead to the Covid leak. If China is at fault for the leak, so is the US. If China owes reparations to the US, then so the US owes (along with China) to the rest of the world.

So, yes, it was caused by a lab leak. What exactly are we going to do then?
Ask HN: How to better grok the “curse of dimensionality”?
I've sort of stumbled onto this topic organically and now I'm rather curious. In the context of building a recommendation system, I understand the concept of a high dimensional space made of vectors, and how cosine similarity is a way to derive similarity between vectors regardless of their magnitude.

Naturally I was curious about using simple distance-based calculations instead, and I'm hearing about the curse of dimensionality. I think I sort of get it but only on a surface level, not very deeply.

I'm also curious if it's possible to take any high dimensional space and somehow convert it into a weighted graph instead? And if there are recommendation/similarity systems based on this approach instead, and basically how all of this works in general at a holistic level.

I find 3Blue1Brown's videos (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM) to be so good at explaining subject matter. Is there anything in this format that really helps illustrate all of this new material I'm referring to?
Well, pretty much everybody buying commodities at an institutional level are using futures contracts to smooth over price risk.

Oil, gas, lithium, corn....
how many different record separators do you have?

ImHex may be useful to you if you only have a few. You can write a pattern file which parses the whole file and displays everything, if you want.
Proton mail user experience nightmare
protonmail used to always be protonmail.com

They later allowed people to register under proton.me, which is shorter

Sounds great, but why didn't they register protonmail.me when registering proton.me? Think of how many people accidently registered using protonmail.me, which goes nowhere.

So annoying . Some websites do not allow you to change the email until after verifying it, so you are locked out for good if you make that mistake.
I would be interested to hear from people who are in (or have been in) senior leadership roles who do not have a LinkedIn profile, or really any online presence for that matter. What's your approach to finding interesting roles? Does the lack of a social or professional profile come up in interviews? Have you run into any real blockers moving in to more senior roles, or securing new positions at other companies?
I got one today by writing to someone on r/redditalternatives mentioning it. Would offer you one, but can’t yet send invites.
> "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

In retort - "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."
If you don't know who Daniel Ellsberg is, you probably don't know what the Pentagon Papers are either.
This morning I asked GPT-4 to solve a simple problem and it hallucinated a function in its solution.

I told it that it hallucinated the function, and it apologized and admitted the function didn’t exist.

Then it gave me a new solution that used the same hallucinated function, but wrapped it in another hallucinated function.
Yep. With the teenagers pitching in not only for their own spending money, but also their families.
How to request an abandoned community or a mod list reorder
I've used my fair share of macros to transform text. Vim's great for that. But that's less than 1% of my work as a developer. Much more often, I'm wanting an IDE to do things like:

* Run/debug code

* Jump to a declaration of a function/variables, or find it's uses

* Extract some code as a function

* Rename a variable (and all uses of it)

I bet vim probably _could_ do all of that with the right plugins - but dedicated IDEs do it out-of-the-box. Even something as simple as indent/dedent a block of code is "click-and-drag, tab/shift-tab" in an IDE, vs. ":<range declaration>s/^[^$]/ /" in vim.
That's true. It's not a great trade-off. The problem is the tons of low-quality "bill proposal" articles that attract attention even though they tend never to amount to anything.
If this were true “by definition”, no bank would issue loans, no pension fund would buy bonds, and the only place you’d find landlords renting out homes are in cities with massive price appreciation. There would be absolutely no business occurring in Japan and “value investing” strategies would never have been imagined.

Growth is lucrative, but capitalism can put a price on finitude just fine.
It’s interesting that somebody thinks ChatGPT is already a thing to stay. I still see it as a great tool in its infancy that can go away at any point in favor of some new generation. And car makers are known for being extremely bad at maintaining their infotainment system.
I have a similar project https://github.com/shi-yan/Epiphany
PRC changes “employment” definition to at least 1 hour of work per week
Of course they don't, but it is hard to measure if they like the community due to the power users and moderators that do care about the API.
Rumor is that brandall10 knows how to properly badmouth an actor or anyone. But for me, I think brandall10 is a swell guy.
My wish for the next generation of "serverless" is that they find a better thing to call it than "serverless".
Yeah it was very patient of them to allow all those people to create, curate and moderate content on their platform at no cost to reddit.
This entire argument is dumb.

No one is using a Vec<T> with indexes for long term storage if you know you will remove and replace items there, it's obvious regardless of programming language that it's a bad idea.

You use a dedicated data structure for this where the keys have a generation and that solves the ABA problem.

Rust has multiple crates that provide such data structures.
AAA will change a tire for you, and I've driven past plenty of service calls where I saw exactly this happening. Also, run-flat tires are a thing.

I get where you're coming from. People in the US mostly don't put in time to learn the ins and outs of vehicle maintenance. They want turnkey personalized transit and turnkey maintenance. I've just accepted that as the state of how things are.
Are you an AI?
From the front page, I think this offers some insight into server admin's mindset.

> The ongoing Intel CPU bug debacle with Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, MDS, the jCC/cache-line bug, Fallout, LVI, Portsmash, etc, etc, and the ME backdoor is making the main GMP server far from as secure as we'd like it to be.
I've used the XVI32 hex editor for Windows in the past.

Written in Delphi.

Split pane.

Useful app. Free.
> Who would invest in a Reddit IPO now?!

The same kinds of investors who did no diligence on FTX. I am certain there is dumb money out there.
Regarding carbon neutrality: yeah, by using their enourmous capital/pricing power to buy all green power relegating the rest of the country to either use greenwashed grey power or outright grey power. So learning is green, it's just the rest that is poluting....
It has a nostalgic feel about it. Not just the visual design, but how it wont answer questions but it will look for terms. Sometimes you want a less algorithmic engine. Takes me back to my first messing around with dialup in 1994.
Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...
The vote is like Who's Line is it Anyways? The points won't matter and everything will be made up. If it's gamed by the stay blackout crowd they'll say there was fraud and do what they want. If it gets gamed by the takeover crowd they'll accept the results as is.
Yes. I should have specified that. Rare, larger doses.
> They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods.

There are surprisingly few mods for how much engagement the subreddits have. There has to be mods that are just as good as the current batch, but haven't had a chance to shine.

This of course assumes the selection process is built to identify and promote mods that are as good, or better than the old mods.

Question for HN: If you were the Reddit admins, how would run the moderator selection process to get a great crew?
Utilised much by the FPV drone community, such that some camera systems even advertise Gyroflow compatibility
as a society we have moved on from whistleblowers - now we lock them up or call them conspiracy theorists - all enabled by the corporate media who does nothing but the bidding of the three letter agencies who tells them what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.
I don’t care about openness too much. Though, the ability to side load is nice to have, that’s that. I am not going to swap between ecosystems, I want the ecosystem that I am using to change.

The thing I don’t quite understand - why do you bother? Having the ability to side load doesn’t affect you in any possible way.
For whatever it's worth, I personally like the screenshots of the pages that shows up when you browse random; I think it really helps in recognizing a site you may have been to before. If there were a way to incorporate that into all search results, along with a more information dense listing, I for one would find that quite useful. Kind of a 'I can't remember what it was called, but I'd recognize it if I saw it' sort of thing.

I also really appreciate the desire to use available screen space. It irks me to no end when a site forces a narrow column of info/content and wide empty borders wasting half or more of my screen. Wikipedia recently started doing this and I can't say they're better for it in my opinion.
"but reddit is extorting fees from users, not google. why would google care if reddit wants to self-immolate and keep content inside their platform?"

my brother in christ, no man is an island; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promentory were.

nobody wants their website to be a linkfarm to content that's all 404'd, it's not that complex. How do you keep that from happening? Host it yourself.
I've suggested, from time to time, a multidimensional model of moderation. You could have the obvious dimension of "banned", along with "spam", etc... either as tags, flags, or numbers

Most people like a simple model, and it's easier to code. There are always corner cases, which is what this discussion is about. Multidimensional voting/moderation would help in those cases.
I wash my pentax under the tap if it gets dirty, not sure how that compares to an iphone?
Post publicly reviewable information and evidence, thanks.