skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd understand if we were dedicating substantial resources to prepping... but we're not.

The number of people and amount of treasure spent on it is a rounding error.

Let other people have their hobbies.
Your comment makes no sense. Applying a bit critical thinking, the following are evident:

1. No one could be paid to dance until their own death, and
2. Mass dancing hysteria has happened several times over the ages. Just Google it. And there have been other types of mass psychosis as well, some even in the last century. Heck, Havana Syndrome from a few years ago [1] may be a case of it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome
> At this scale, if google (...)

How many companies do you know who operate nearly as many servers as Google?
I host a meetup there sometimes, it feel so Blade Runner run out of electric. https://www.meetup.com/futureofdata-princeton/
It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.

It will also stop many potential users from ever becoming actual users.

I do wonder if those doing this are self-selecting for the "right" type of user.
Close. Too flat of a sound overall.
Re: Scorpion, I’ve been persuaded by the argument put forth In Blind Man’s Bluff, that a faulty torpedo battery overheated and kicked off a sequence of events ultimately resulting in sinking and implosion.
> It looks like some people here took your comment the wrong way

HN discourages low-effort snark. If someone is going to complain about Lisp, they should explain why.
I used to spend a nickel or two on O'Reilly books, too. Those were effectively "the manual" for a lot of things, once upon a time.
> Unix tools aren't cross platform (...)

I just pointed out there are Make implementations for Windows.

And I'm not even mentioning WSL or MinGW.

I don't know what else to say.
I read it differently, like the term "amateur scientist" that has been used in the past. To me, it's a term of respect, acknowledging the fact that it's hard to do good science without institutional support, uplifting when someone does it, and spectacular when it's a major discovery.

And oddly enough, people defend science by pointing out that it's like what most people do all the time, but perhaps conducted at a more sophisticated level.

Disclosure: I have "scientist" in my job title.
So they had interns in 1518

“In the hopes of wearing the dancers out, the Strasbourg city council decided to build a stage and hire musicians. Their theory was that the dancers had fevers, “hot blood” that could only be cured by dancing it out. This was obviously a terrible idea: The performance merely encouraged more citizens to join the crazed dancers.”
This may be an internet hoax, but always watch for drop bears when camping in the bush.
https://archive.is/M5bay
Why read anything else. I'm not interested in consensus knowledge. I'm not here for reddit-but-tech with occasionally outrageous news articles. I want to walk on the metaphorical beach and see what oddities wash up.

Besides, if you are here for gentrified reddit and upvotes, you want to read newest anyway so you can get in early on the comment game, because posting when something has 50 comments already is a waste of time.
> I would like to see a citation on this.

E.g. [1] has a decent overview of the side impact saga for the Euro NCAP since 1997. I'm less familiar with how the American version has kept up.

In any case most mass market American cars target the Euro NCAP's safety tests, so it affects car design across the pond too.

> [...]mostly a bunch of new electronics.

I can't think of any electronics in doors than weren't there in 1995.

Powered windows have gotten more common, but if it weren't for safety considerations the thickness of doors should have reduced since then, as all the electronics involved are smaller now.

> Fact is, a current generation Toyota Camry is effectively safer than an early 2000s F-150.

Probably, but some quick internet searching reveals that if you add the weight of one person to the modern Camry it's probably heavier than the 2000s F-150, or thereabouts.

What I was referring to is that crash safety tests don't account for crashes between differently sized vehicles.

That's probably intentional, as regulators don't want to cause an arms race towards ever bigger cars.

1. https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/53189/19-0278-the-development...
I recognize the "hello world" and "int 21h" but, can I ask why that instruction listing seems to start with "xchg (e)ax, (e)bp"?
That's such bullshit when motorcycles are allowed on the road.
Link had a cert error and then failed to resolve.
> For breast cancer, we're talking 88.6% vs 85.8%.

Sure, you can cherry-pick one family of cancers to make a point, but again: there's a whole series of studies that have been conducted on this exact question for the last 30+ years, tracking all common cancers, and which have consistently shown the same results: while Canada does not perform as badly (with respect to the US) on cancer survival rates as many other OECD countries do, Canada does still fall behind the US.

> Another thing to consider is that we treat everyone. You don't have to consider of it's going to bankrupt your family before you engage in treatment. So we often treat people who are sicker and poorer because we don't have affluence as a selection mechanism for our patient population.

Yes, and that actually works against your point: even though there people in the US who can't get treated because of cost barriers, the survival rates are still better in the US.

There are a lot of things to criticize about the US healthcare system. The survival rates of cancers are not one of them.
“The color of your clothing can affect how well it protects you from UV rays. Dark or bright colors, including red, black and navy blue, absorb more UV rays than lighter colors like whites and pastels. For example, an everyday white cotton T-shirt has a UPF of only about 5. As a rule of thumb, the more intense the hue, the better protection the clothing will provide.”

Source: https://www.skincancer.org/blog/dress-to-protect-5-things-th....
In theory it wouldn't be too hard to take the battery, controller, and a front wheel with hub motor. But I think in practice even the extra few minutes to unplug, remove and reinstall, not to mention carrying all this stuff, would raise the friction to the point where it would be quite a chore.
I think they just want it in Node.
The Peanut Butter Parfait from the ice cream truck in our neighbourhood is $8. I think that has a lot more to do with why people aren't buying as much as they used to.
LOGO >> Scratch

Schools should teach LOGO to grade schoolers. Two birds with one stone. Learn something about computers and learn how to use a keyboard.
In 1978, 918 people committed suicide at Jonestown. I think we should all understand that an average human being surrounded by people acting insane will act insane themselves. Some won't, some have contrary convictions or just don't like to go with the flow, but this isn't typical.

Better to understand that this is innate human nature and guard against it than to just say "couldn't be me".
No: an IRC network is a collection of channels. A network is then made up of numerous servers. In IRC parlance a server always in fact did explicitly mean a specific individual server and I would be shocked if you found anyone who hadn't used IRC for more than even a day or so that tried to call, say, EfNet a "server".
See e.g. equations (5) and (6) from [1], where any qubit subset of a system might undergo the action of the M–S gate. But definitely the usual presentation of the physics of M–S is on a two qubit system.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.06819
Career Change from Civil Engineer
Hello everyone,

I feel like I'm at a crossroad professionally.

For a little background, I'm a 37 year old civil engineer living in Canada. My experience resolve mainly around environmental risk management, project manager and management (team of 4 to 20).

I'm currently pursuing (free time) a master in philosophy around the ethics of AI. This is actually for the fun of it, work load is negligible (compared to engineering school).

I have found that I do not enjoy management in big organisation (which I'm doing right now) and civil engineering is a field that is really conservative and I do not fit in the mentality of the industry.

I am a very fast learner and when I stop learning, I lose interest. I'm a problem solver, but not that good in the day to day operations, I lose interest.

Basically, I don't see myself being happy in management role. I do see myself in a more specialized role, being a consultant, teaching. I'm at my best when I'm solving problems.

In order to do that, I need to at least get a master degree and this is where I'm not sure what I'll be doing. I don't want to redo a bachelor degree, so I'll have to stay close to engineering.

A) I stay in civil engineering, pursue a master in a speciality. That doesn't solve my problem with the industry and the conservative mentality I don't fit in with.

B) I do a certificate (10 classes) in computer science that will be enough for me to get in a master in computer science. I would probably pursue AI development or cybersecurity. I think those 2 field have a lot ahead. I don't think the market is saturated, there is always room for good talents.

Option B) is a bit longer to take (1 year to 2 year max), but I feel it has more potential for growth. Pay is also a factor, in civil engineering, unless you want to manage huge team or have your own firm, salary are around 90K at the moment. I, maybe wrongly, believe software have higher pay for individual contributor and the possibility of making your own thing is higher (civil engineering is way harder to have your own company, needs a lot of cash).

Is it really hard to change career at my age (heard there was some ageism in the industry, might be false).

Thanks for your input.
It's pretty dangerous when those that are in a position to make a difference are also able to position themselves in such a way that they won't go down with the ship if they don't.
Yes, ice cream that melts into what resembles a soapy sponge, and takes weeks to finally disappear from the sidewalk is scary. Thankfully there still are ice cream makers that use actual cream, and not whatever this modern concoction is.

Someone will come up with an Instant Pot convenience level ice cream maker, and then it'll be worth eating again.
Highschool does typically reward bullshit (especially in the humanities where the bar for "verifiably bullshit" is much higher) over "idk lol"
> the actual product itself is nothing special.

I wouldn't agree. Aside from Slack, Discord built the next highest quality browser-based chat and voice app, targeting consumers vs enterprise. It's well engineered, reliable, and has a simple user interface (mostly).
The government/society is already regulating vices. It really is just a question of who gets to decide what is a vice and what is not. Propositions that reference "human or civil rights" are begging the question. What are "human rights"? What are "civil rights"?

I suggest you can't really have a useful understanding of political questions in the abstract. When you look into the history of these policy decisions, there's always something more going on than a purely reasoned universal morality.

Take your example of Prohibition. The Temperance Movement was around for a long time before it formed a political party and started gaining traction. Why? Was there any connection between the massive social upheavals that were changing the society in the U.S. at the turn of the century that might have put wind in the sails of this party? Prohibition was "progressive" politics but does that word "progressive" still mean what it meant then? No. You can't have a Progressive party without some sense of "progressing towards what?". In that case, you were talking about the WASP ruling class that had very long-held ideas about what progress meant, dating back to before the founding of the country by English Dissenters. Of course, the advent of WWI had the normal accompanying propaganda campaign. Prohibition benefited from wider anti-German sentiment (anti-beer) and war-time grain conservation efforts.

But, arguably a bigger reason for Prohibition's policy achievements were widespread anxiety about urbanization and "saloon" culture in the cities, which was widely and accurately associated with immigrants and african americans. In a sense, you can see Prohibition as a last-gasp attempt to control the social forces changing America at that time and restore "law and order". The fact that it gave rise to organized criminal gangs (mostly run by the very people they were trying to restrain) was an unintended consequence. We see a similar thing at work with the War on Drugs.

I would argue, the reason these Prohibition-type campaigns against vice fail is because they treat the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is a culture that is dissipated and lacks moral cohesion. Arguing about "moral universalisms" like libertarianism proposes is just more of the same. All honest morality is particular, just like all rights are particular. There has never been and never will be a universal morality without turning the world into one homogeneous goo. So long as there are different peoples, there will difference conceptions of the good. The sort of pro/con argumentation is a distraction from reality, imho.
There is a Linux GUI! I’ve used it — it seems to work fine.
It was about 300 years from William Harvey's publication of his insights into the circulation of the blood before bloodletting fell out of common use. De Motu Cordis was published in 1628 - 'An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings'. The last medical text recommending palliative bloodletting was published in the 1920's (iirc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Harvey#De_Motu_Cordis / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercitatio_Anatomica_de_Motu_...

I found a paper by some medical historians that said medicine became useful between 1910 and 1912: where a random person going to a random doctor with a random condition was more likely to be helped than harmed.
That indeed used to happen in the 1990s and it had a big impact on my life. We used to get about 30 minutes of computer time twice a month. One of my favourite activities during that time was to try and draw interesting shapes and share the code with my teachers and friends.

I remember I was particularly proud of drawing a simple house with an animated dashed border. Since we did not have hard disks yet and floppy disks were very limited in number, our computer teacher helped with quickly transcribing the code from screen onto a paper, so that we don't lose the program I had just written and demonstrated to others.

I have written a blog post about my happy little experience with Logo programming, in case anyone wants to read more about it: https://susam.net/blog/fd-100.html
Can cricket crack America? New T20 league aims to take US by storm
I don't know about quirky, back when I first found out about it, it was surprising that I could read it without having written a single line of code on it. That's damn impressive.

To me, its type system and parsing nature are one of a kind, to be able to label everything as what it is

[money!] is $12.53
[tuple!] is 5.5.5.5
[date!] is 16-Jul-2023/21:00:17

means the parser immediately parses and type checks everything, all while looking as human readable as possible.
(disclaimer: I work on the team developing Q# and its tooling)

That's part of the goal of Q#. It's designed to be a language which allows you to build up from quantum gates, efficiently work with quantum concepts such as 'adjoint' and 'controlled' operations, and build that up into a higher level of abstraction. You can see an old post as to some of the reasoning when it was first developed at <https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/why-do-we-need-q/>.

Another consideration to some of the points raised here, is that even on today's state-of-the-art hardware you typically only get a couple thousand gates at best before noise overwhelms the system and the qubits 'decohere' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence). So you do often want to develop at a level where you can squeeze every last gate out of whatever program you're writing. (If you intend to run it on a quantum computer and not just simulations).

Being that the post is about quantum simulation, you can see the one our team built in Rust at https://github.com/qir-alliance/qir-runner/blob/main/sparses... . This uses 'sparse' simulation, which means any state with a probability of 0 isn't tracked, which turns out to be quite a few in a lot of algorithms. This allows you to simulate many more qubits than you can with a full state simulator (where you need to track 2^n states for n qubits). It also does some other nifty tricks where you can elide or combine gates before they are performed to get even more perf. We use it in our new Q# stack (https://github.com/microsoft/qsharp) to run program simulations in our CLI or in the browser (such as on our new https://quantum.microsoft.com site), or inside VS Code (desktop or web)).

We are looking to evolve the Q# language and improve the quantum development experience, with a focus given to a 'scalable' quantum future where gate count and noise is less of a limit, and moving development higher up in abstraction - as you outline. So if it is something you have an interest in, we're more than happy to get the input on the qsharp GitHub repo linked to above.
Yes, it would make for a nice movie. But real life isn't a movie and of course I'm fine with individuals making their own decisions I still think we should look at the general picture through the lens of finding out what the likelihood of certain scenarios is first. Prepping for an intermediate stage is ultimately not a very good disaster mitigation strategy, you plan for the worst and hope for the best. This intermediary stage of a slow slide isn't going to be stopped because of some FORTH code if and when it happens. But I wish those who believe it will all the best.

edit: I think this sort of thinking is more of an excuse to scratch an itch than a realistic scenario. We are not so addicted to computers - yet - that we could not revert back to some stable society without them, but some of us are so addicted to them that we can't imagine a society without them. The first couple of hours of any major crisis will likely correct that in ways that are going to be very unpleasant. Effectively aiming for something 'in the middle' is aiming for a crisis that isn't a crisis. Anything that actually is a crisis would be better served by acid free prints of Wikipedia and the designs of common farm implements that can be made with just bench tools. You'd be on your feet again in a short few hundred years. But if you remain addicted to playing around in FORTH while the world goes to pieces around you chances are you'll be kicked out of any community you're a part of because you're slacking off your farming duties. Any world where you think you might need this will be so drastically altered from the one you live in today that you won't need it, you'll be way too busy to try to stay alive.
You've clearly never been on a bike path in America! Road cyclists wearing spandex suits are the most universally obnoxious group of assholes you'll meet here. They make Tesla and BMW drivers look polite, and will openly roid range on anybody that doesn't dive out of their way while they ride shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the path.
They're probably talking about the front grille being a vertical wall taller than the standing height of a 5-foot woman, which would knock you under the wheels without the driver even seeing you.
Good for them. While they are getting whatever social satisfaction they care about (which is fine, if you're an enthusiast, you can seek out whatever validation for your volunteer effort you want - I don't judge)...

I am just trying to solve my problem, and the design of Discord leaves me with a shitty experience nine times out of ten.

I won't judge the enthusiasts, but I will judge the hell out of whomever set the thing up.
I dunno about teachers, but I definitely remember being a kid and adults having explosive reactions to my saying, "I don't know why."

I think, at least here in the States, we've improved our cultural understanding of how to appropriately talk to/discipline children since then, however.
If you are truly making a difference from the inside, I applaud your efforts.

I am skeptical however that you find yourself in a position to move the needle in any meaningful way.

When your employer sells a product you know causes lasting, multigenerational harm and they fail to at least lobby for solutions that might change the incentive structure so that they could do so responsibly and still make a profit, you might be working for the bad guys.

You should examine closely if your positive actions are greater than the harm that is being done by your participation.

It quickly gets murky, , participating in a fundamentally unethical process under the pretence of making it less bad in a small way.

If no one participated under the current methodology, the problem would be solved. Of course that will not happen, but still “if I don’t do it somebody will anyway” is an extremely hollow justification for compromising one’s ethics.
What strikes me as narcissistic is the presumption that you know what is narcissistic. It’s possible that the reasons for their presence is simply a mystery that we have not figured out yet.
> I've seen quite a few in for-loops, so I'm not sure that's tracking for me.

The difference is that for-loops are almost an essential language feature – the vast majority of languages have them (or a close equivalent), and they make certain algorithms a lot easier to state clearly. Sure, there are some languages which lack them, but they tend to be either languages with non-mainstream paradigms (such as pure functional or logic programming languages) which put all the emphasis on recursion instead, or else really old legacy languages which predate the development of structured programming (such as pre-1980s versions of COBOL–modern COBOL versions have for loops)

By contrast, almost nobody considers checked exceptions an "essential language feature" – languages which lack them vastly outnumber languages which possess them, indeed, Java stands out as the only major mainstream language to possess them

Given the argument "this unusual inessential language feature causes more bugs than it prevents", the response "this essential language feature which the vast majority of languages have sometimes causes bugs too" isn't very convincing
It’s homoiconic, so the quirkiness serves very similar goals to, say, Lisp.
What about the costs of launching the first-cycle spent fuel into the sun or building caves that protect humanity for 10000 years?

It's probably worth it to reprocess if only to shorten half life.
Is this just to reduce the maintainenance resources for those chat archive or more that their future plans would be encumbered the legacy?
Theyre doing this at the cost of removing peoples histories, the emotional log, their friendship memories, ability to relive their favorite moments together. All the dopamine kicks they get and a huge part of the social appeal and stickiness.
With all the features their killing, they're removing functionality that is the core of their social success
Even working as a scientist, I buy equipment from eBay. If you bide your time, you can find useful bargains. In fact, even when my budget can accommodate new gear, there can be exceptionally long lead times, whereas an eBay seller has it on hand and will ship it out tomorrow.

This makes it harder to copy a documented design, of course, but most of the time a scientist with a knack for gear can adapt things as easily as copying them.

Also, people did photon counting for a long time without 50 MHz ADC's, just saying. ;-)