skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It generally refers to polyfluoroalkyl substances, often abbreviated PFAS. The "bad" ones are hydrophobic compounds that can accumulate in fat tissue. There are some PFAS that do not appear harmful because they're nonreactive solids (e.g. pure PTFE) or because they're not hydrophobic enough to biomagnify (e.g. trifluoroacetic acid). Discussion of PFAS among non-chemists tends to elide the differences between all fluorinated organic molecules and the ones of environmental concern.

These compounds are not literally "forever" but they have long half-lives once released into the environment, due to the strength of C-F bonds and due to pollutants partitioning into low-degradation-activity environments. For example, a certain compound may be degraded by ultraviolet light from sun exposure, but tend to adsorb to soil where it's shielded from light.

PFAS share a lot of characteristics with the earlier-known "persistent organic pollutants" like polychlorinated biphenyls:

- Polyhalogenated organic compounds

- Low acute toxicity

- Endocrine disruptor activity

- Low rate of natural breakdown in the environment

In fact PFAS of concern share so many characteristics with the historically known PoPs that I am not sure why they got their own phrase "forever chemicals." They don't actually seem to have longer half-lives than those PoPs known by the 1970s.

For further reading, here is a page on PFAS from the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants:

https://chm.pops.int/Implementation/IndustrialPOPs/PFAS/Over...

And one from the Environmental Protection Agency:

https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained
This article (about a super interesting and precise measurement of background gravitational waves) reads like it came from Parade Magazine:

"The gravitational wave background, as described by the astrophysicists, does not put any torque on everyday human existence. There is not a weight-loss discovery in here somewhere. A burble of gravitational waves cannot explain why some days you feel out of sorts. But it does offer potential insight into the physical reality we all inhabit."

This is just embarrassing for the Washington Post; the scientists who worked so long for this result deserve better science journalism.
I guess you're a slow or easy hiker or something, because most people can immediately tell the difference between boots with a 1kg per-boot difference between them. I'm not even some kind of super-serious hiker, but I'm not going to choose boots that weigh double. Even walking around town that much weight would be annoying and tiring.

Anyway, I do agree about using synthetic material for the soles, and leather construction doesn't necessarily have to be super-heavy.
I would say the RISC-V immediate encodings were like that, on first look they seemed completely random but as soon as I started implementing the decoder I realized they were geniusly crafted to make my life as easy as possible.
I agree that there are lots of poorly made games that predictably flop. However, it's also worth noting all the bits of a game that matter outside of the executable. Knowing where your audience hangs out and how to reach them, having the ability to make compelling trailers and screenshots, having press contacts to help promote your game, crafting a viable monetization strategy, etc. All these things matter more than most observers would think when differentiating between known and unknown games.

It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.

[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.
> Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw.

Knowing what we know about memory, that is not at all surprising.
That's not his argument; he says defining Θ = e^2πi is not useful because e^2πi = 1, so Θ and Θ^x would also be 1. That's why he defined Θ = e^2π instead, so that Θ^x (or possibly Θ^ix) is a useful operation.
If not your car itself.
I love the linked site, BTW. It is exhaustive (in a good way).
Fake it till you make it. Smells like Sam Bankman-Fried.
Right, but that’s the same advice as quitting.
Well.. I brought receipts. Why don't you try doing the same?

I'm not talking about tech specifically, just overall liveability/affordability for the average person trying not to die on the streets.

Is there some reason people in the Amsterdam sub seem pretty content and the people who have lived in both Amsterdam and Vancouver think Vancouver is unaffordable?
National Geographic has somewhere between 1400 and 1500 total employees, from a quick look online. The magazine is just one tiny sliver (unfortunately) of their media presence.
Super cool. A friend of mine built an event based task runner on the PIC18, but this looks even neater.
This type of immigration is strictly for economic and quality of life purposes.

It’s pretty bonkers to say people who immigrate to the US on H1-B visas are doing so out of an altruistic desire to “help” anybody but themselves and their families (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

People seem to still prefer immigrating to the United States over Canada even though Canada’s immigration system is far more reasonable. They’re trying to scoop people up with policies like this but I think it’s worth taking a step back and reflecting on why that is. I think a big part of it is Canada’s cost of living especially wrt housing is even worse than the US’s and salaries are lower.

And I say this as an expat currently living in Mexico with a fair amount of Americans and Canadians. So this isn’t a pro United States comment, it’s just a reality check. The US has draconian immigration rules and hoops to jump through… but it seems like the demand is such that they can get away with it.
I'm not quite sure if it is true that those tools are better than "the real world". There are many options for each of the steps that you are mentioned, old systems mixed with new solutions, so developers have to learn all of them and onboard to each of the system that they decided to use. While they provide some templates and scripts here and there to solve these problems, most of them are not production ready, and doesn't provide a holistic experience. I work for smaller companies before and the platform teams did a much better job to provide a unified experience across those steps.
It would be far more surprising if they didn't...
Multi-user.
> Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.

26% of road funds come from gas taxes; 11 percent from tolls, another 25% from the federal government: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inflation alone it should be $0.46, so drivers have received what amounts to a 25% tax reduction in the last ~30 years. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in thirty years. So there's another tax break drivers have gotten.

That's just inflation. Average fuel economy has risen from 18mpg to over 22, which means per mile drivers are paying on average 20% less of "their fair share" due to mileage increases alone.

So it's a bit weird that suddenly people in gas cars are getting high and mighty about EV owners "not paying their fair share."

> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher rate. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.

The Ford F150, which is the most popular "car" sold in America, is between 4,069 and 5,697 pounds.

A Tesla Model 3 is 3,862 to 4,048 lbs. A Chevy Bolt is ~3600lb.

Yet..who gets taxed more by Utah? Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?

Also, where were all these concerns about increased road wear on budgets when American purchasing trends tilted toward larger and heavier SUVs and pickups? Average vehicle weight has risen 10%+ since 1990.

EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?

Bish, please.

Utah didn't want to raise the gas tax (it's a political third rail) so they relied on their extremely stupid electorate to buy up the myth that drivers in gas cars are "paying their fair share" and instituted a punitive tax on EVs which Dumb Yokel Bob fully supports because it's sticking it to those "libruhls in them fuckin' priuses an shit", believing everything he hears on conservative radio about EVs (for example, that they 'cost' more CO2 to make than a regular car. Which is true....until around 14,000 miles into ownership when the EV breaks even compared to a gas car.)
You're right, and I consider this the frontline there: https://www.go-fair.org/
I understand your analogy, but I reject it's validity. Degrees/radians/turns map to meters/feet/angstrom. Decibels and octaves are true "number" multipliers. You could for instance talk about degrees in octaves or in dB if you like. It's just not particularly useful for the domain

Edit: another example difference. I can't measure an octave or dB. I can measure a degree

Edit2: we've reached reply limit but I concede you can measure a decibel. Point about dB degrees still stands though
Another cool grid-breaking language for Polyrhythms and euclidian and beyond sequences is Nestup.
https://nestup.cutelab.nyc/

In addition to the website and github, It also has a great implementation as a Max for Live device and can drive Ableton. I’ve enjoyed it since it’s initial release.

An interesting interview with the creators from MusicHackspace is here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/wZeadB56YFs
I've added the statement "let's think through the problem step by step" after your instructions. Here's GPT-4's answer. I don't know Rust so let me know if this is a better answer:

---

Sure, let's break down the problem:

1. Identify the topmost window: We can use the `winapi` crate in Rust to interact with the Windows API. The function `GetForegroundWindow` can be used to get a handle to the topmost window.

2. Check if the window is a Windows Explorer window: We can use the `GetClassNameW` function to get the class name of the window. If the window is a Windows Explorer window, the class name should be `CabinetWClass`.

3. Get the path of the active folder in the Windows Explorer window: This is a bit more complex. We can use the `SHGetPathFromIDListW` function from the Shell API to get the path from an item ID list. However, getting the item ID list for the active folder in a Windows Explorer window is not straightforward. We might need to use COM interfaces like `IShellWindows` to get the `IWebBrowserApp` for the window, and then use `IWebBrowserApp::LocationURL` to get the URL of the active folder.

4. Return the path as a string or a blank string: This is straightforward. We just need to convert the path to a string and return it, or return a blank string if the window is not a Windows Explorer window.

Here is a skeleton of the function in Rust:

```rust
extern crate winapi;

use std::ptr;
use std::ffi::OsString;
use std::os::windows::ffi::OsStringExt;
use winapi::um::winuser::{GetForegroundWindow,
GetClassNameW};
use winapi::um::shellapi::SHGetPathFromIDListW;
use winapi::shared::minwindef::MAX_PATH;

fn get_active_folder_path() -> String {
// Get the topmost window
let hwnd = unsafe { GetForegroundWindow() };

// Get the class name of the window
let mut class_name = vec![0u16; MAX_PATH + 1];
unsafe {
GetClassNameW(hwnd, class_name.as_mut_ptr(), class_name.len() as i32);
}

// Convert the class name to a string
let class_name = OsString::from_wide(&class_name)
.to_string_lossy()
.into_owned();

// Check if the window is a Windows Explorer window
if class_name.starts_with("CabinetWClass") {
// TODO: Get the item ID list for the active folder in the Windows Explorer window
// TODO: Use SHGetPathFromIDListW to get the path from the item ID list
// TODO: Convert the path to a string and return it
}

// If the window is not a Windows Explorer window, return a blank string
"".to_string()
}
```

Please note that this is a skeleton of the function and it's not complete. The part to get the item ID list for the active folder in a Windows Explorer window and get the path from the item ID list is complex and requires using COM interfaces, which is not straightforward in Rust. You might need to use a crate like `winrt` to interact with COM interfaces in Rust.

---
> seems like it should be able to support a fair number of writers easily?

I wonder where the money is going?

And I wonder how much a 1980s subscription cost (adjusted for inflation?)

>> The magazine was initially sold to the public as a perk for joining the society

Maybe that's not such a bad idea.
> Wikipedia says TCP is from 1974 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol). That would mean it turns 50 next year.

Yes, but 1974 TCP is completely incompatible with the current TCP. In the original 1974 version of TCP – https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675 – they hadn't yet split TCP and IP out into the separate protocols. I'm not sure what is the earliest version which is interoperable with contemporary TCP/IPv4 – probably either the 1981 version – https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc793 – or the 1980 version – https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc761

TCP/IP first entered into widespread production use on 1 January 1983, when ARPANET switched over to it from the earlier (incompatible) NCP protocol. The version of it adopted at the start of 1983 had been finalised in 1981/1982. Prior to that, it was only used on a research/experimental basis, which meant that incompatible changes were frequent.
YC vs. CDL
> it's just a wasted effort on their part

I guess my naive expectation is that it should be any effort, hence the question.

> Then again, in most cases rewriting init script to run as systemd unit is very straightforward; but then I saw some fucked up init scripts too, like ones trying to start and manage multiple services at once (here hearthy "fuck you" to packetfence developer that thought that would be a good idea)

LOL, now you've triggered an old memory of IBM WebSphere MQ and its... charming init scripts. It was almost easy to replace them with service files, except that IIRC template unit files can only use one variable to template and we needed two, so I did something ugly. (I don't even remember what, just the gross feeling.)
> pieced together by editors

Well, that sounds like a disaster. It’s like asking the project manager to create a program by piecing together some code.

I remember getting a spam call back in the 90s. They were trying to sell magazine subscriptions. I wasn’t interested, but when asked what magazine I liked the best I responded with National Geographic. The person on the line had never heard of it. I was honestly surprised that someone had never heard of it. They said they would ask a manager if they offered that magazine and I did wait since I was curious. They did not.
I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.
Right, like I said I don't think any init system has actually figured this out but that is what as an admin I actually care about rather than startup times or the aesthetic properties of the configuration files. You would need some kind of semantics that define what it means for a system to be "ready". In practice we tended to lean towards some kind of polling of the service itself (which is at least slightly better than "sleep 3" or whatever).

Now, it's true that if applications would adopt systemd's Notify system this could really help, but this is equivalent to saying "if software were different it might be better".
A problem with a similar flavor: how long does it take the earth to rotate once on its axis?

The answer is about 23h56m. However, after that time, the earth has also moved slightly relative to the sun, so it takes another four minutes for the earth to rotate enough such that the sun is at the same point in the sky as it started at. Hence why we consider a day to be 24h.
It wouldn't take that, just a leak/study of the ROI of online advertising. If the results show that the average ad impression is significantly less than currently assumed, then everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

The status quo is that nobody knows how effective their ads are. The only people with the data necessary to even begin to analyze the effectiveness of ads are the ad-serving companies, who have a strongly vested interest in making them appear as miraculously effective as possible.
It's a really old idea that if you haven't gotten your value back by x period of years give up the value is gone.

It could be that it's older cultures that operated this way. The idea is that a loan turns into slavery at some point and that is unacceptable. There is also the aspect that if you could go this long without the loan being repaid you have enough already.
first off, thank you for diving into this. As someone who studied neuroscience at college, we’re getting into some of my favourite topics :)

So, to answer your question there is actually a ton of research on the influence of gamification, reward mechanism and positive conditioning and their effects on learning outcomes. If podcasts are your thing, there is a wonderful Huberman Lab series on this too. I will link towards the end here.

Dopamine, the chemical which controls pleasure, learning and memory in the brain, can be used to hijack motivation and increase attention spans among learners – and when used correctly, it can even make your learning program/app addicting. Basically, what Litnerd does is leverage dopamine release (a big cash prize in this case creates shock and huge anticipation which acts as the initial hook/motivator) to get kids to want to signup and go through the monthly habit of our app and the reading activities.

After the first month, we do not see reading levels or activities in app go down. Even thought the cash reward incentive is gone. Students are still competing monthly and the chance to win more Litcoin (our points system in app) is what keeps them motivated afterwards. We hold competitions monthly and the reward is more Litcoin. For kids, however, an added motivator of our app is the weekly meetup. Kids want to be in the know with their peers each week at the meetup and this helps keep motivation for staying up to date with the daily reading and reading courseware.

Growing up in Karachi, my motivator to get good grades was to avoid getting beaten with a metal ruler. This was normal in my all girls school. Another motivator was that in highschool, our grades were posted in the local newspaper and it was considered dishonor to the family to not have A’s at least. This mechanism of negative reward system definitely plays into dopamine as well but research shows that positive conditioning leads to better long term learning outcomes than negative conditioning.

We have real data to show that in just 4 months, students improved comprehension scores by upwards of 70% and phonics by upwards of 40%. You can bet that i am eager to report back in a full year on how we compounded learning outcomes across Vocabulary, Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Comprehension and Fluency.

All that to say, I feel you on tiger parenting. And that is why I am so bullish on what we are building and our positive dopamine connection by making learning fun and exciting via monthly tournaments (again, you only have a cash prize reward once. Every month thereafter, it is pure gamification without cash prizes).

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Would love to hear what you think?
This should not be allowed, Visa trying to buy their way in to maintain their global dominance..

What Lula's team doing? Certainly not protecting their own interests

Huge loss for Brazil and South America
How would you compare Tidal to stuff like Sonic Pi? I admit Haskell appeals to me WAY more than Ruby, though it seems the install process isn't as seamless as SP is.
We are extremely lucky that the bankruptcy court did not let Detroit's creditors raid the collection.
A Quick Tour of NVM Express (NVMe)
Eric didn’t manage to do his internship but we still offered to pay for the whole thing.

We missed one invoice and accounts asked him to send details so he could settle but instead he decided to a month later say that stuff to Forbes then said straight out he didn’t want it paid

https://twitter.com/erichallahan/status/1639695790724591618?...

https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1665520024080068609?s=4...

Idk I hope he’s ok

https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1671287589507063812?s=4...
Milk V is now live on CrowdSupply
It’s good the test is available.

What I mean is what would justify someone spending $400. The example of pregnancy is not a good one, as someone is better off just monitoring blood pressure (which is already common advice for all expectant mothers) for $100 instead of paying for this test.

I think value based healthcare is more important when people pay themselves.

Since there’s no intervention based on the results, it’s not a good idea for people until the results are actionable.
This Ars Technica article did a good job of answering a lot of the questions I had:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nanograv-picks-up-si...
You expect good articles out of WashPo? Scientific journalism... from... WashPo?

WashPo is many things... but good journalism and scientific journalism is not two.
I had the same experience. The beeline that Progressive's snapshot device did actively encouraged worse driving behavior in a city.

I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.
High-minded doesn't sell. TLC was originally "The Learning Channel."
I can't find stats one way or another on this point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯