skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had similar experiences with psychedelics. It seems like once you lose touch with some sort of "self-image", it can be very hard to get back. Wish this was talked about more.

The first and most pronounced depersonalization experience I've had was with mushrooms. I had taken ~2g of dried mushrooms and was feeling pretty good, so I decided to take a walk in the park near my apartment. Gradually I started feeling like the boundary between my self and the outside world was getting fuzzier. My body felt like a machine that existed as part of a larger machine.

Then, suddenly, I thought: who is the driver of this machine? If I'm the machine, what is driving it? I felt like I was taking a walk in the park with a VR headset on. I wanted to take off the VR headset and experience "true" reality. I kept asking myself this question, shedding layers of self-identity, until I reached a state of absolute nothingness. Absolute, zero, blackness. It was probably only a brief second, but in that moment time didn't seem to exist. I didn't seem to exist.

The actual experience of the "absolute nothingness" wasn't bad per se, but integrating it back into daily life was a struggle. It felt like nothing made sense. I "remembered" who I was, but I couldn't seem to just immerse myself in that person again. The layers of my self-identity didn't feel real anymore. Nothing felt like it had a reason for existing. Everything was arbitrary.

For a while after that experience, daily life became a struggle. I didn't have the motivation to do anything. Talking to people was hard because I felt everyone was wearing a mask of sorts. It's also hard to understand this sort of DP/DR unless you've experienced it. Like the article, I remember discovering the terms "depersonalization" and "derealization" from desperate Google searches. It gave me a bit of relief to just be able to put labels on the experience. I read about "ego death", which also gave me some perspective.

I also started developing physical symptoms. The explanation is probably just stress/cortisol, but it seemed like the cells in my body also suffered from this lack of subjective identity. I developed chronic inflammation, an autoimmune condition, and had trouble sleeping.

Gradually, over a year or so, I got better, I think due to gradually forgetting about the experience. Still, I don't think I ever returned to the person I was before. It seems like there will always be a part of me that "refuses to drink the Kool-aid" -- that can't fully subscribe to my ego's self-identity anymore.

That being said, I don't regret the experience, as I think there was some sort of truth in it. But I do wish stories like this were talked about more. It's not about avoiding "bad trips", but finding a way to integrate it into your life.
Emacs enthusiasts have https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

I see some parallels to Hurl, but having everything inside Emacs is hard to beat, just thinking about using M-x jq-interactivly for json responses ...
Sample size one. Contracting for a trading shop for 2 years taught me that it's not technical aptitude that keeps the business rolling.
People also block ads because they are worried about privacy and profiling.

I can’t pay google to stop profiling me, so there’s no way I’m paying for youtube premium.

[edit: honestly, the new three strikes for ad blockers policy looks like a usability improvement to me. It makes sure I don’t watch more than three videos without clearing cookies]
Yeah, Smith's little chestnut requires heavy interpretation and contextualization. Definitely not the 'anytime any person or organization sells anything in self-interest it is good for everyone because markets' definition which it often gets dragged out for.
An Introduction to System.Threading.Channels (2019)
One of the worst little utilities I have ever written was the SOP for managing user permissions for 4 years after I puked it onto our internal bitbucket as a personal toy that might be helpful. This despite being awful, ugly, unfriendly, literally broken in some normal use cases, fundamentally flawed, and extremely irregular in it's usage.

It was never fixed. I don't think I even got any grief for it. At the end of the day, I had built a utility that went some of the way towards fixing a problem that nobody else was tackling. Shitty code running and working will always beat perfect code nobody ever writes. The most important lesson I have learned to be a better software developer is that if you don't write SOMETHING, no matter how awful it is, you will never get anything done, and you can always make it better.
I mean, I took Sindre's move to ESM-only publishing as his own choice as the author and maintainer of his own OSS packages. In the spirit of OSS, he doesn't need to justify the choice, it's good enough that as the author he's making it. The previous CJS versions are still published, and anyone can fork the modules if they want to take on the maintenance burden of the CJS version.

That preference has had an impact on the Node ecosystem at large, given how prolific an OSS contributor Sindre is, but IMO that influence has been earned by the large body of work he's contributed.
In other words, the best money laundering scheme ever created.
> This doesn't really affect me since I subscribe to premium, but something that a lot of ad-based services don't seem to grasp is why people block ads.

As many services like Hulu, cable TV or even just premium hardware have shown, paying for a service doesn't mean a company will never succumb to the perceived revenue opportunity of showing ads to paying subscribers too. I also pay for premium, but it's very much a case of "Doesn't affect me.. yet"
Typical webdev. The last full time job I had I made around $100k a year. I've been freelance for a while and struggling to find clients, so for the past year I've been working around 20 hours a month at $70/hr.
Lego Town Funk (AI video style transfer the music video is all Lego)
https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo (audio nsfw)
Thinking in terms of symmetry (a U b == b U a) and idempotence (a U a == a) might be useful as well. A symmetric but non-idempotent operator yields bags again, but idempotence without symmetry produces "sequences without stuttering", which (as has been observed by many, eg Lamport) are useful for combining abstractions.
Since when can you run heroku pg:upgrade to switch database tiers? I've been following an upgrade sequence I put together over the years [^0], but I guess Heroku automated this at some point? What would be really funny is if this had been possible all long...

[^0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/blob/master/.notes/d...
Indeed, your observation at the end there holds true, and it is regrettable.

The choices you're discussing lie comfortably within the sphere of normal discourse. I empathize with the fear though: It's hard to find support amongst civilized dialogue without it devolving into conspiracy about governmental machinations or similar notions.
> I wonder if there’s a word for a craft that controls its buoyancy regardless of medium

sperm whale
That’s why I mentioned income, not net worth.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/homeless-not...

Smartphones are essential in daily life to many people, even if they happen to be homeless.

Hopefully in most countries it is possible to have an internet connection even if you don’t have a home address. I.e that even if no one lets you buy a mobile subscription it will still be possible to have prepaid SIM cards in your country. And that some of those prepaid providers do not require that you have a home address.
Goldman Sachs Wants to End Apple Partnership, American Express Might Take Over
Whilst this is still so popular it's melting my server, I added two new maps: one for 1997 and one for 1999. I also added lazy loading capability to help ease the bandwidth usage.
there is a further problem: a lot of the profits instead go to the too big distributors they sell their produce to.
If the NYSE went down, wouldn't most trading stop because of people being frightened about using old mismatched prices?

Besides, when has an exchange gone done for hours, let alone days? Absent intentional breaks in trading as speedbumps.
Everybody should have line item veto rights for code running on their computer.

if youtube wanted to make the ads unblockable, they could embed them in the primary video stream. They won't do that because then they would have to expend the computational effort of muxing the content instead of offloading it onto your computer. They want their code (javascript) to manage the ads to run on your computer and they want to be able to treat your computer as their slave.
The FBI has formed a national database to track swatting incidents
Something similar happened in Sweden:

Farah Alhajeh, 24, was applying for a job as an interpreter when she declined to shake the hand of a male interviewer for religious reasons.

She placed her hand over her heart in greeting instead.

The Swedish labour court ruled the company had discriminated against her and ordered it to pay 40,000 kronor ($4,350; £3,420) in compensation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45207086
There’s a really great movie about AI called 13th Floor.

Its plot is roughly that of The Matrix, but it spends more time dwelling on the fact that most humans are really computer programs.

In the end, we, the AIs, can’t actually fight reality. The real people, living in the year 2024, can just pull the plug, or rewrite us.

The same is true for actual AIs. We can just pull the plug.

Regarding the argument that “we” won’t want to pull the plug because the minority who control AIs are getting rich - that’s just technology.
There are more glass factories in Europe than the one in Sunderland that Arc themselves closed down in 2007.

Something like 30 million plus of glass was made in the EU27 in 2007 in over 200 facilities, nearly all of it would be soda lime glass (i.e. "normal glass"). https://climate.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2016-11/bm_study-g...
BTW I tried it with ChatGPT 3.5 - with a prompt that roughly described the database schema and a question "I need to know the manufacturer for the vehicle with VIN X7820-A and to confirm whether it has the feature 'rear camera' installed", it came back with

SELECT TVehicles.Make,
CASE
WHEN TVehFeatures.FName = 'rear camera' THEN 'Installed'
ELSE 'Not Installed'
END AS RearCameraStatus
FROM TVehicles
JOIN TVehFeatures ON TVehicles.TV_ID = TVehFeatures.TV_ID
WHERE TVehicles.VIN = 'X7820-A';

One interesting thing to note - I didn't tell it that "Make" and "Manufacturer" are the same thing.

I even went the next level and asked it to write me code to execute the query and generate appropriate HTML output from the results. It didn't quite manage it to handle any possible SQL query (remembering that the query itself has been dynamically generated), but wasn't far off. My description of how the output should look was simply "sleek and modern", and it came up with CSS that could be reasonably said to fill that brief.
Probably because the options won't affect those making and supporting those policies, and the whole way the system is setup, the impact is gonna hurt everybody from middle class all the way to the bottom.
American Express is often not accepted even in countries where it's supposed to be present (e.g. quite a few shops in Sweden don't accept AmEx).

Visa and MasterCard are much more universally accepted.
I had the same thought, but can't imagine what else it is.

I'd like to think that if these people were on cocaine, we'd at least see some of the creative irrationality that led to the more-fun aspects of the 70s and 80s. Who's making anything awesome just for the sake of doing it? Who's commissioning assassinations of business rivals? Which startup founders are trying to save their failing business by pivoting to drug smuggling?

Were it weed, they'd be more chill and empathetic. They're not. Musk constantly looks like his blood pressure is through the roof. He's probably done it once or twice for spectacle (e.g. all the 4/20 stuff and that podcast) but is doing rails of Adderall the rest of the time. It explains him sleeping under his desk like that's some kind of sign of hard work. All I see is a demented bridge troll going through an Adderall crash.

Shrooms? LSD? They'd be chill, happier, and trying to pivot the core business in entirely new directions every week. At least one of them would have had an epiphany and actually tried to make the world a better place. There's also no creativity to be found. Our architecture consists of baby's first shapes. Our car colors are every shade of baby shit. America (and the internet) has never been more sterile. Reddit has always looked like a corporate portal.

I'm convinced it's all Adderall for all of these people, and the ambiguity in verbiage comes from it not all being legally obtained. It's not prescribed medication at that point, it's just a controlled substance they are in unlawful possession of.
Really the only reason I used Spotify over YouTube Music at all was that I could use my own clients with Spotify, but once Spotify killed that it was over to YouTube music for me for my streaming usage (though I buy a lot more downloads these days than my peak spotify usage days). YouTube Music doesn't have third party clients either, but with that selling point removed, ad-free youtube was a better add-on than anything spotify offered.
You just carry around a QR code of your key, hand it to the merchant to conduct the transaction, and they promise not to make a copy of it.
Show HN: Serve your GitHub Gists as static websites
GitHub Gists are great, but if you have some HTML + CSS + JS in them,
it would be nice to be able to preview those as working micro-websites.

gistxy.com allows you to do just that (GIst STatic proXY).

If you have a Gist URL like:

https://gist.github.com/tzador/80c83ed5f5a0bdf8c878c5478d7d8...

just replace the .github. part with .gistxy. to get GistXY URL:

https://gist.gistxy.com/tzador/80c83ed5f5a0bdf8c878c5478d7d8...

and you will get the contents of the Gist served with correct mime-types and a working micro-website.

It also renders the markdown files to HTML, so you can focus on reading or sharing just one markdown file.

For security reasons, each Gist is served on dedicated subdomain.

Not sure how useful this is, but it was quite fun project.

Written in https://kit.svelte.dev and deployed on https://vercel.com .

Due to rate-limits, it scrapes the gist data from the Gist website, instead of using the GitHub API.
MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information
I think that we can agree that Europe (in particular the EU) is facing a awake-up call and must pull together in defence and other matters.
Only quote points.
We've known for like 50 years that the longer we push cost onto environmental externalities, the worse the options get. It's a little late to complain about the options, folks.
> I wouldn't expect to receive a dime from anyone else; I never did during a hurricane.

You did, though, indirectly. Federal funds were used in lieu of state funds (your taxes). In essence, I paid for some of your cleanup. I agree that you didn't receive a personal check from the federal government, but you did benefit from their action.

Even your insurance is done with this method -- you pay an insurance premium which is far less than what would be paid out in the event that your house burned to the ground. If we're using the same insurance company, my premiums go toward that as well.
> where you need solid math basis and a deep understanding of the science behind it all.

I __REALLY__ really wish this were true. But I'll be honest, I know quite a number of researchers at high level institutions (FAANG and top 10 unis) that don't understand things like probability distributions or the difference between likelihood and probability. There's a lot of "interpretability" left on the table simply through not understanding some basic mathematics, let along advanced (high dimensional statistics, differential geometry, set theory, etc). The AI engineering often "needs" less of an understanding.

But I don't think this is a good thing. I specifically have been vocal about how this is going to cause real world harm. Forget the AGI, just look at how people are using models today without any understanding. How people think you can synthesize new data without considering diversity of that data[0], can create "self healing code" that will generate high quality and good code[1,2], how people think LLMs understands causality[3,4], or just how fucking hard evaluation really is[5] (I really cannot stress this last one enough). There is a serious crisis in ML right now, and it is also the thing that made it explode in funding: hype. I don't think this is a bubble in the sense that AI will go away, but I think if we aren't careful with how we deal with this then it isn't unlikely to see heavy governmental restrictions placed on these things. Plus, a lot of us are pretty confident that just learning through data is not enough to get to AGI. It just isn't a high enough level of abstraction, besides being a pain (see the semantic deduplication comments about generation). But academia is even railroaded into SOTA chasing because that's what conferences like. NLP as an entire field right now is almost entirely composed of people just tuning big models instead of developing novel architectures (if you don't win, you struggle to get published despite differing factors). We let big labs spend massive amounts of compute to compare to little labs who can get similar performance with a hundredth, but don't publish those works. It is the curse of benchmarkism and it is maddening. Honestly, a lot of times I feel like a crazy person for bringing this up. Because when I say "ML needs a solid math basis and deep understanding of the science behind it" everyone agrees, but when the rubber hits the road and I suggest mathematical solutions to resolve these, I'm laughed at or told it is unnecessary.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36509816

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297867

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35806152

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36036859

[4] https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/papers/NN99.pdf

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36116939
For network debugging participating in the NLNOG ring is a must:

https://ring.nlnog.net/

ssh access to VMs hosted just about everwhere with lots of tools.

https://ring.nlnog.net/toolbox/

https://ring.nlnog.net/toolbox/looking-glass/
And ironically, less available in America.
The retailers love it though.

I even Amazon is getting in on it.
What even is unaccelerated video?
Not just summarisation, information extraction in general. LLMs are great data normalisers.
> If you have React engineers, why couldn't you have AI engineers?

We most definitely could. That's one way to prop up a cottage industry, stay relevant, command hefty salaries, and maintain that charade of importance through complexity by creating Frankenstein features in search of problems and promotions.
This is probably my favorite novel of all time. It has a little bit of everything: romance, action, philosophy, religion, history.

The only thing I'll say is if you've read that Assassin's Creed is "based" on Alamut, you might be a bit disappointed. I would say it's more of a "heavy influence".
Are there any examples out there ofactual algotrading strategies that made money in a real market, say within the past 10 years? I know these are closely guarded secrets, but figured someone may have published a strategy that ceased being profitable.
Theoretically - yes.

Practically, it's poorly documented clusterfuck of very confused technologies (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18448125). I hope they've possibly sorted that out over the years, but I don't have much hopes. Although they seem to went monorepo for FxA stuff (IIRC, it used to be that Accounts and Content services were separate). Still, no end-user docs - best you can get is assorted bunch of articles aimed at developers: https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel... - summing it up, it's a project that no one seem to have ever meant to be able to use outside of Mozilla, an ability to self-host it is an accident.

It used that one could've host a single simple program and have everything working. After switch to Firefox Accounts, trying to deploy all those services and their dependencies (and keeping up as it grew) quickly became complicated. I used to maintain my own half-assed almost-all-in-one re-implementation (https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync, still required Kinto as a dependency), but I gave up.
I've had two Xbox controllers ruined by stick drift. Both camps are shipping cheaper non-Hall effect sensors in their controllers.
Biden administration approves potential $440M arms sales to Taiwan
I don't see it either for 108 USD/year. I get that they need to pay for servers, for developers and etc, but I pay less for Spotify and somehow they manage to license vast amount of content.
I also think that validating an API against it's OpenAPI schema is a great methodology. You should checkout schemathesis, it's fantastic for doing that.

https://github.com/schemathesis/schemathesis
Guess this is goodbye to my Reddit account. I already stopped using it earlier this month, but it’s time to delete it for good. I was hoping for something reasonable to happen, but looks like it won’t.

Honestly kinda glad to be getting the wasted time back.
> Some dolphins have more than twice the number of neurons we do.

Larger animals have more neurons because they have a larger surface area (full of sensors, that need to terminate someplace).

Some animals have noses with very large surface area (lots of sensors). I suspect surface area of my Irish Wolfhound's nose is something like the size of a football pitch.

I'd bet dolphins, seals, and the like have a lot more sensors/cm2 of skin than humans, and probably other important sensing as well that we don't need.

Unlike, say, octopus, I'd expect the higher order reasoning of mammals to use structures somewhat similar to each other. I doubt think dolphins' brains devote much of those extra neurons to higher order reason (but this is speculation -- I'm no cetaceanologist, nor neurologist for that matter).

> I bet they've got some interesting things to say.

Probably much less than the average human, and that's a pretty low bar, even with a generous definition of "interesting"
No one is forcing YouTube to operate, at a loss or otherwise. They can stop any time they want.

If YouTube disappeared tomorrow it would arguably the best thing that happened to internet video since its inception. You can only imagine the variety of services that would spring up, maybe a standard way of finding and viewing videos would emerge.

People don't realise how damaging (essential) monopolies are, abusive or not.
And they almost fubar'd the Pocket integration witht the Kobo eReaders in the process.
Next article: Can you live in a van?