skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That the AI's thinking might be more advanced than ours is not in dispute. What's different about humans->AI compared to cockroaches->humans is language. Imagine we take our library of congress, with 50M books, and create a cockroach version of the library. It's a totally pointless exercise.

Now imagine being an AI and creating a human-readable library with 50M AI-written books for us to read. They could easily do that. And then create 50M more, again and again. And they could read every book we wrote. And forget books, humans and AI could have hundreds of millions of simultaneous real-time video conversations between humans and AI, forever, on any topic.

So being a human in an AI worlds is nothing like being a cockroach in a human world. Sam Harris used the same analogy but said we were ants instead of cockroaches I've heard bacteria also. I think people trot out these bad analogies strictly because it sounds dramatic, and being dramatic seems like good way to get people's attention. Or else they just didn't think it through.

Human language is a Big Big Deal. It's a massive piece of cognitive technology. Any intelligent species with language is in the club and they can communicate with all other intelligent species -- even if those species have very different cognitive capabilities.
The most relevant pieces of news to me are weather reports, those emergency alerts I get on my phone (mostly weather-related), and week-old stories. The first two are immediately useful and actionable. The last one involves topics that have clearer information and staying power.
I don't think the CEO cares about that anymore
Fiber. Dot.coms, housing, crypto, AI, ….
Solar on roofs kinda sucks. It's way more expensive to install and rarely at an optimal orientation. And they will get covered in snow for months out of the year depending on climate.

Government money would be much better spent on a regular solar installation on the ground. Much cheaper to install and maintain.
At the time of this comment there is one other saying that everyone is leaving, and two replies claiming it is more useful.

The question is how many of each group are there? I suspect that many more are leaving than joining.
I think it’s more analogous to our body sustaining damage it can’t reverse on its own. Think about clogged arteries or bad lungs.

Using external intervention (aka surgery), we can already remedy these situations to an extent. The methods aren’t great today (immunosuppressants suck), but soon - we’ll be able to grow organs compatible with our DNA using our own stem cells.

So hypothetically, you can live eternally if you can figure out a way to solve every possible breakdown before the heart stops or neurons start dying.

It’s a bit like keeping a car running forever, and maintaining it without ever turning it off. Will it be a massive engineering challenge? Yes. Will it be expensive? Likely. Is it impossible? No - nothing jumps at me that would make it impossible.

For the heart and lung part, we already have ways to keep the body functioning without a working heart or lungs temporarily[1]. We can even handle failed kidneys[2].

As far as I can see, our biggest challenge is identifying the point where physiological processes stop working, causing irreversible damage. And the biggest unfixable damage is losing your memory (if the respective neurons die). Everything else is akin to changing a tires or batteries or engine.

1. Cardiopulmonary bypass machine, or a heart-lung machine
2. Kidney Dialysis
They created an account on a social networking site called plurk in Taiwan a few years ago because they were upset that Twitter's terms had changed and they would no longer be able to post pornographic illustrations, but in the end they clung to Twitter because there was no guilt to be attached to them, and this time will be no different.
So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.

Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.

As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.
> 3.) Questions asked by friends and relatives regarding progress

This one in particular had me temporarily cut off contact with people who could not be bothered to remember that I had no interest in answering this question!
Funny reading the discussion about this topic because a lot of times it feels like people intentionally sabotaging the growth of Fediverse/the features of Mastodon the software.
Energy prices are rising in all of the industrialized world, and cars are reaching "prohibitive prices" everywhere. Does that mean the whole world, not just Germany, is deindustrializing?
> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind.

And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.
Playing devil's advocate a bit, imagining an argument that definitely wasn't made in the essay itself, and which I don't necessarily think is right: It's possible that he meant that love seems like a distraction like others, but is actually critical in some way for doing great work. There are both kinds of stories out there, both those whose loving partnership was clearly critical to their work, and those who were isolated and loveless (but maybe would have been even more successful if it were not so?).

But I do tend to agree with you that if it is "how to pursue great work at all cost", then singling out love as the only distraction worth keeping is contradictory to that thesis.
Yeah but they didnt shut it down because of some safety concerns, in truth nuclear is just too cheap for infinite growth of the German electricity corpos, and those pay all the politicians. Highest electricity prices on the planet, that's good old corruption that rotted Germany to the core.

And their politics is all neoliberal, of course they drive people to the right, it's the only alternative that doesn't threaten capital.
A very important part of the work of the advisor is to pick a subject that is not been researched by other group, so you can work on it without the fear of been sniped. It not foolproof, but if three or four ideas get sniped, it's probably better to kindly consider an advisor change.
I'm a little confused by this comment. It feels like you are complaining about the problems that are solved by configuration management and infrastructure as code, yet you seem to reject it as too complicated.

All the problems you raise are solved by infrastructure as code.
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

- Brian Kernighan
It was just easier

I got out of the demo scene after the Commodore 64, but isn't the whole point that it's supposed to be hard, not easy? That's what makes it amazing.
> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
The renewable push in germany came because the greens (and other parties) wanted to shut down nuclear and replace it. If the exit from nuclear was never started, germany would have been much less willing to invest in renewables. German invesments in the early 2000s were one of the steps towards renewables being viable.

If germany kept nuclear as-is the counterfactual might look worse due to the expansion of renewables not happening.
My 4-step plan for non-fiction book writing
The guardian does that type of advertising of books etc all the time and it annoys me greatly.

They should have more integrity and at least put the notice at the top
This is the future of the internet, huh? AI re-writing the web to personalize it for users.
That line was my favorite.

It's challenging to be a public figure, present yourself on contemporary social media, and not be pressured (implicitly or explicitly) to speak up on everything.

Though I don't read this as being about political or social issues. How else would you have someone politely say, "I'd like to be left alone to do my work, but I'd also like to share with you what I'm working on."
Is it really a bad thing to be able to enjoy Mastodon and Lemmy among just the early adopters, trend setters, and minority of people who make deliberate choices of what platform to use rather than the followers?

We already know what happens to networks when they get bigger. Should we really be encouraging the eternal September to happen so early?
Twitter is more censored than ever. It just censors different things now.

One example: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon...

Another: https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisg...
> A censored platform was of little use

it's still very blatantly 'censored', just with different ideological front shouting about it.
When I needed to use this function, it was because the Android API to run things asynchronously using Handler.post()/remove() seems to be incomplete. You want to remove() a runnable, but maybe that runnable is executing in parallel exactly when you want to remove it. Depending on what you application does, this will cause various issues. The simplest way to fix issues in this case is to synchronize the threads using RunWithScissors. In short: the API is simple and easy to use, but it allows for strange cornercases, and you need a hack like RunWithScissors. That function is a hack because for various other reasons related to the rest of the API and the way it is implemented, it may block forever in some other cornercase. So maybe we can say this is broken behavior and an bad/incomplete API.
> I believe he said this to satisfy his audience

So Macron being Macron.
That's not true. Unchecked power allows people to become sociopaths, and the more power is accumulated in a small group, the harder it is to check. It's not an automatic process, despite what those in power want you to believe.
As a current 4th year graduate student, I opened the link and found the choice to accept or decline the admission offer, I don't know why I clicked decline without thinking.
This really stretches the meaning of propaganda almost to the point where it's synonymous with individual speech. Propaganda is systematic opinion making where some group does things like call tons of people or distribute tons of leaflets, or astroturf internet forums. It's not the same thing as putting up a mural on a building you own, or a sign in your yard.

I think a mural could be part of a propaganda campaign, but I don't think by themselves they merit the categorization.
As an xoogler, I don't agree at all. Google has a ton of problems, but a reluctance to think deeply about and fix tech debt isn't one of them. In fact, I think the eagerness to fix fundamentally broken abstractions is a big reason Google has so much code churn and is so eager to irresponsibly deprecate things that work!
I think that's reasonable terminology. "Token" is an overloaded term.

I'd be careful about "stored in a cookie" (really "sent in a cookie") because that would not be how an auth token would be sent or received. Not in a literal cookie, but another HTTP header.

I think it's fair to say that all cookies are tokens. The distinction between a typical cookie and a token in this context (i.e. a token that is difficult to revoke) is:

If a token needs to be looked up to know its authorization scope, it is easy to revoke (just update it or clear it in the lookup database). This is equivalent to a session cookie.

The challenge is when the token contains the auth scope. This might be used when the two systems do not share a lookup mechanism. These can be difficult to revoke before their built-in expiration time. This (token revocation) is the "hard part" about JWTs.
> Hottest day recorded, likely since 1871 (1), but actually we don't know because the article doesn't offer that information. The Earth has been around much longer though.

Why does it matter how long the earth has been around? We're not talking about the hottest day of all time (remember that for a long time the earth had a molten crust), we're specifically talking about the hottest recorded day. It sounds like you're putting it as a gotcha when it's just the topic.
While a three button mouse is certainly the best, there are some mice (like Logitech G305), where the scroll button can be easily triggered by pressuring it from the side, so one finger can operate both left and middle buttons pretty much independently.
Goland does too
On that link I get a giant banner on top of the story that says:

Support the Guardian

Fund independent journalism with $5 per month

Support us

So the message is "We are doing something bad to you. Pay us for it."

The author is careful to carve out an exception for "independent journalism" rather than news but, ironically, in a newspaper.
> more energy generation capacity installed than it had last year

Nameplate capacity of a new solar plant with a capacity factor of 15% (remember, a cloudy country north of the 50th latitude) is not comparable with nameplate capacity of a well maintained nuclear plant with around 90% capacity factor...
You can keep a car going forever. Just replace what is not working well. Will it still be classic? Probably not but it’ll work just fine.

There is still the Ship of Theseus argument - if we replace everything in your body, is that still you? I’d argue yes - as long as the memory is intact and the brian is alive - producing and consuming signals throughout.

I guess - a test could be, can you be “awake” through any procedure done to your body? (if we had advanced ways to block all associated pain with the surgery)

Perhaps there’s no need for that as long as the brain can be kept alive in a state like being in a nap.
Well, it’s clearly biased towards Italian and French ;)
Does checking Rotten Tomatoes and reading an article on how the Marvel Multiverse has gone downhill, count as news?
> I actually don't know SQL very well

That's a huge, huge gap in your skillset. SQL databases are generally the one-size, fits-all of databases. There's good reasons (very good reasons) to use alternate databases; but they tend to be outside of the primary use cases of an application.

One of the very important features of SQL is that how you query your data isn't tied to the structures that are convenient for a particular use case.

Basically, the problem with using CouchDB and MongoDB as a general purpose database is that you're storing and querying data structures, or documents. It's easy early in a project, when your use cases are small.

The problem comes later in the project, when a requirement comes to query a data structure that's deeply nested inside of a document. This can incur a rather substantial performance penalty, unless you denormalize your data.

For example, when I used to go to MongoDB conferences, they used the example of a message board, where all messages in a post were stored in the same document. (For example, imagine that all messages in this thread are stored in a single document.) The problem then comes when you need to support a page like https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gwbas1c, that lists all posts that I've made.

In the case of SQL, supporting a page like https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gwbas1c is merely writing a new query and updating an index. It doesn't require denormalization or scanning many documents.

> I actually don't know SQL very well

Another reason why it's important to understand SQL basics comes from being able to write code that performs well, within reason. I constantly inherit code that uses an ORM (library that translates between SQL and objects), and the code just can't perform.

The original authors didn't know SQL at all, and just assumed that the ORM would do the heavy lifting for them.

> I actually don't know SQL very well

You don't really need to know much SQL to get by: Just four commands, "select, insert, update, delete," (and upserts) and then understand joins. Understand transactions, and you're all set. You can leave the more advanced features to when you need an advanced database feature.
What censorship was bothering you? The censorship against transphobia? Because that's the only thing I'm seeing censored less. Other forms of bigotry are still getting accounts locked, and we're far enough from 2020 now that nobody really seems to be bothering with election denial anymore.

Meanwhile, besides its stability issues, there's the new problem that the top replies to every popular tweet are... well, pretty awful, because they're chosen by blue-check instead of popularity. That's a huge downturn in reading enjoyment.
> The people of Brazil have every right to make use of the resources of their country.

It's not the people of Brazil that are benefiting of the resources of the Amazon rainforest. Even worse is believing that the destruction of the rainforest is the catalyst for Brazil's growth.

Also:

> This kind of doomerism is exclusive to rich countries and is little more than whingeing.

When one can finally afford bread, they still are too busy to see how fucked up our global economic divide is. Give a starving man a crumb of bread while you have stashed food for years, and they'll weep with gratitude. It's all a matter of perspective.

Sometimes you need a vantage point to notice how unfair everything is.
I'm a strong believer in structured concurrency over async.

That said, I do not know if there would be an easier way to implement the state machine in the article using structured concurrency over async. Maybe that is actually one place where async would be better.

I need to look into that.

However, for those in the comments arguing that async is better for I/O-bound stuff, I heavily disagree.

I implemented a multiplexer system. You can start any number of operations you want and then multiplex them. This blocks until one operation is done, yes, but hey, you have threads, so use another to do something else if you need.

But this multiplexer allows me to decide what function gets called for each type of task that finishes. This means that the caller still controls what to do then the "future" completes.

So it's equivalent to async, but it's still synchronous. Nice.

I can have it multiplex on multiple types of things too. I actually haven't implemented asynchronous I/O with it yet; I mostly use it to multiplex on child processes.

So I agree with one of the top-level comments: async is a hype. There are better ways for most use cases.
The irony that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out is not lost on me.
Adam Savage Learns Sci-Fi Space Helmet Secrets [video]
Location: Singapore

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, SQL, WASM

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kg6vy1GVu5jKZnX7iSZhzIp9pQD...

Email: iobt92 at gmail.com

---

Have been working on a high-performance, collaborative "Figma for business" (contracting for US-based company) using Rust + WebGL + WebAssembly (WASM) for the past ~1.5 years. Exploring compilers on the side as a personal interest.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Mind to share what new ideas that was censored before you find interesting?
As far as the Patriot Act, when Max Cleland came out against it, the Republicans claimed he “didn’t love his country”.

Cleland lost three limbs in Vietnam. None of his opponents had ever served.
> more than a dozen popular Japanese illustrators have opened Weibo accounts in recent days

> At least 20 Japanese illustrators have launched profiles on Weibo since Elon Musk announced reading limits for Twitter users on Saturday.

You just can't take this article seriously. That's not even a blip in twitter's user base.
I just want to say that open-source projects like these that have these fancy marketing pages and rely on a huge amount of marketing tricks & twitter reposts makes me less likely to use them. Unfortunately, this is all too common in the JS world these days.
Well, first it was posted, and then it was liked, just like all the other posts that make it to the front page.
Thanks for the explanation!

> You do your experiment. You don’t find any evidence you were correct. So you test 20 other ideas. Lo and behold, 1 out of the 20 new unregistered ideas passes the test of seeming to occur with less than a 1 in 20 probability of occurring.

I think this ^^^ is the part that's tripping me up: the notion of "registered ideas".

Suppose we have 21 researchers, each testing one of those 21 ideas. They pool their funds and hire someone to generate that one data set.

20 of those researchers would find their ideas unsupported by the data. But one researcher would find their idea was supported. And that's the only study that gets published in Nature.

I don't hear about this ^^^^ issue being criticized the same way P-hacking is. But AFAICT it's a similar kind of statistical factor.
Yes.

Context: The President it was addressed to had been working to prepare for war against Germany for most of a year. Einstein's "famous, politically ~neutral super-genius" reputation was far loftier than that of any signatory to this Open Letter. And it warned the U.S. President about a super-powerful type of bomb which Germany might develop (and use against the U.S.A.) during a period when both bomber and bombing technologies were obviously advancing very rapidly.

If a "smartest in the world" mathematician wrote the current U.S. President, to warn that the crypto algorithms currently used by the U.S. for uber-secret stuff might quite possibly be fully broken by China in the next few years - then I suspect that the current U.S. President might be fairly willing to take action. That is not the scenario around this Open Letter.
We do complain about Poland. But this is a thread about Germany.

> Does it have a set date to remove coal from electricity production? Yes.

The date is simply ridiculous. 2030 or so AFAIK? We expect much more effort from such a developed country.