skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel sorry for the friend. They died being unable to communicate their last words.
Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate
Has it even been proven that insects retain “memories” as we know them? The question always leads back to 1 of 2 options. 1) insects are biological robots and their “instinct” is akin to a program executing code based on the I/O of their senses, or 2) the information required to perform their “instinctual” actions is carried genetically.

Option 1 has significant implications for humanity; are we just more complex machines who believe we’re different (due to a complexity beyond our understanding), but are ultimately just deterministically executing code like a spider? Are we genetically/chemically pre-determined to learn, think, feel and decay the way we do based on the I/O of our lives, and everything we’ve ever done would be repeated identically if we were rebooted and exposed to the exact same I/O (down to the planck unit).

Option 2 indicates more of an inherent “free will”… but even then, are the memories just a more complex form of input, but still inescapably deterministic.

Personally, I believe in determinism — that another universe which started in the EXACT same way (down to the most miniscule detail), exposed to the exact sane external forces (if any) would lead through the EXACT same events to the EXACT same end.
Discord does support other search features. It would be nice to have a wildcard search, for sure--but, in my experience, even on busy and large servers I very rarely can't narrow something down to what I was looking for with `from` and `in` along with not-just-single-keyword matching.

But also, it's chat, so I don't really care if on the once-per-month I use the search I have to think about it for a second, because all the other stuff is there and it's good.
The poll is to determine if people understand that their phones are essentially the government.

Both geolocation and sexual proclivities are often considered private.

2 years ago I had access to enough data to stalk any person I chose, anywhere in North America. If they connected to a network of websites (GM/Stellantis/Nissan corp and all their dealer pages, plus most of MBUSA) I could see a profile of them and where they went.

I knew their work schedule, where they worked, where they did lunch, when they were in a meeting and when they were taking the day to go to Canada's Wobderland. This was done with permission of the friend and encouraged by my boss.

The end result was dealerships having a ~90% accurate intent to purchase. Which was used to increase sale prices. We were measuring the success with our partners at a Lexus dealer in Toronto.

* Some brands(of vehicles) have been changed to similar brands to protect myself.
Or as similar to a two-generation-cycle parasite that alternates between a host-A form creating eggs that grow into a host-B form (creating eggs that grow into a host-A form, etc.)

The pupa internally "gestates" the adult as a parthenogenetic clone-child; the adult being gestated, absorbs the pupal parent's entire body for nutrients — and, crucially, the pupal parent's body allows this absorption of its entire body, producing no immune response to it, because they have the same DNA. As with a cyclic parasite, you get two different complete lifecycles, that are each born, live, and die from the same genetic program, given a different epigenetic kickstart, in a back-and-forth cycle.
Luckily mexican immigrants live all over the US, so if you hunt hard you can probably find some good places, even in rural areas.
Great result! Sad however, that the iPhone takes really poor photos by default without additional software :/ (iPhone 14 Pro is super blurry)
A little bruising, no concussion. Parents took me to the hospital and had me looked over. He had no horseshoes and must have just grazed me.
Sounds like a good argument for longer sentences. If they can't be deterred (and many of them can't) and they can't be resocialized (and many of them can't), why let them out and ruin more lives?
The OC is maybe referring to Larry Niven’s ring world, in which a race of humanoids called the Pak which resemble real life elderly people, only with armoured joints and immortal, have a life cycle where their offspring are humans. Once reaching old age, pheromones given off by a certain type of tree that bear a fruit similar to an apple, cause the humans to be overcome until they eat the fruit, at which time they metamorphize into an adult Pak, increasing intelligence massively and lifespan. In the book, the humans of earth stay as the larval stage as the “Tree of Life” were never planted (or never produced the correct fruit, I can’t recall) on our planet as there wasn’t the right kind of minerals to support it.

The Pak went about colonising planets and they left their offspring on earth when they discovered radiation coming from the centre of the galaxy that was changing the genetic makeup of their offspring, causing the adult Pak to murder their own offspring and all sorts of wars.

The Pak built a massive ringworld (think Halo) because that’s easier than colonising a planet apparently, but their offspring started to mutate wildly into different offshoots of humans, pygmies, humans with gills, etc.

It’s a good series and enjoyable to read but it’s not a particularly serious story. One of the aliens is depicted as being some sort of hand puppet with legs. Super odd stuff.
Except that its not a currency to buy things - apart from using the network. It's not an investment vehicule, it is not a way to buy nor lend nor bet - it is closer to the seeding/dowloading ratio many private torrent websites have set up.
Having different build tools, that’s one thing. I can live with a somewhat wonky development environment to work on my code, as long as I can set it up once and it works after that. I would prefer elegance, just one is used and that’s it, but I don’t know of a language with a large user base that has that.

My point lies more in the install experiences for say, a command line tool written in said language. For Java I need one Java install on my system, it’s the most recent one. I install it and then all the old code just works, all my Java command line tools just work, I never have to watch homebrew install some stupid version of Java@11 when I have Java@13 installed like I do python@3.9 when I know I already have python@3.10. All of this is BECAUSE people basically threw up their hands and distribute the core language at their version with their code and their chosen dependencies “installed” into it… so we’ve all got 15 bespoke versions of the same language kicking around on our hard drives. That is really stupid.
Well one problem is that from an individualistic perspective, it makes financial sense to have as few children as possible (all other concerns aside). There should be government policies such that it's more financially rational to have kids, especially since children are generally a net positive.

Perhaps there should be a tax that starts at age 19, and increases in percentage the longer you don't have children. I am also not sure if it's better to only tax women (since they are the ultimate gatekeepers) or men as well.

If you do have children, especially 2 or above, the government should pay you dividends in some form along with other benefits.
Interestingly the "academic boycott of Israel" is getting most traction in the US and UK. I know academics here in Denmark who were surprised their American and British colleagues refused to collaborate with Israelis.
> Actually, if a previous account happened to have a phone number attached, and you're asked for one again when making a second account, then provide the same number, Discord will automatically ban both accounts with no way to appeal.

You left out that it just bans you on any servers that you're already banned on.

It doesn't deactivate/suspend your entire discord account for trying to reuse a phone number for servers that require verification.
I was hit by a bicyclist once. He could have chosen to walk, but instead he chose to ride at something like 25mph down the same path as I was walking. He saved a few minutes. A lot more people get injured from bicycles than from safety minded pedestrians.
The one mentioned in the article exists as a commercial product too: https://www.vrdesktop.net/
Thanks, not a typo, never occurred to me that the two character sequences are almost as different as the two concepts. I guess I'll invoke "they rarely occur in the same context" as my excuse, and how passive use gets by just fine without looking at the letters all that closely.
I see a few comments suggesting a change of government will help.

The previous Labour government (1997-2010) introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_...), which amongst other provisions includes key disclosure rules (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Ki...). The burden of proof in key disclosure is inverted (the accused must prove non-possession of the key or inability to decrypt), which was somewhat controversial amongst people who cared at the time (activation, i.e. actual use if RIPA III provisions, began in 2007).

The same Labour Government ran the Interception Modernisation Programme (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interception_Modernisation_P...) (you may recognise this or "mastering the internet" from the Snowden leaks, although IMP was not a secret) and proposed legislation to enact part of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Data_Bill_200.... This never made it into law.

I think Labour are on board with this, and the senior civil service (those at the top levels who work with ministers or close to those who do) don't change in the same way US administrations do. It might be the case that this bill runs out of time in the current parliament and is not picked up by the next government (this can happen even if the same political party holds office) but the idea will be back in some form one way or another and I suspect will make it into law.
Analogy time:

You use a wooden chair for reaching up in high places. Imagine you're a short person and utterly dependent on this chair. It works for 20 year, and it helps you reach what you need in all that time. You never notice much except for some familiar creaking. The chair works every time, and you just take it for granted as a handy tool to have around.

But when the wood in that chair snaps, it happens all at once. Even if just a single part of that chair momentarily fails. Gravity, leverage, falling backwards with no way to protect your head. And it happens so fast, there's no time to think about it while it happens.

Luckily your husband put a cushion on the floor exactly where you'd fall with your neck, because he anticipated this happening. He just didn't know when it'll happen.

You wake up a bit dazed, and a bit wiser to how the world works. How fragile and complex systems can fail all at once and too fast.
> pricing is a policy choice

This is an exceedingly silly statement. The money printer stopped going brrr. Things cost money.

The cost of building high-speed rail is very high. Letting a relatively small number of people
commute is, imho, low value.

Toss out some napkin math numbers if you’d disagree. I’d love to see your cost/value analysis. Feel free to complain about how much money we spend subsidizing highways if you want, but only if you include numbers and value for rail.
radio is probably one of my all time fav concepts. thanks for this
The point is, the mainstream media narrative has been 95% focused on the social media devil. That's leading to stagnation elsewhere.

It's not only unstructured play, it's physical activity that's needed. But how do you tell a society raised on taking pride in fat & stupid that the bridge they brought is - in the context of history - one of the biggest scams of all time? You don't. You go all in on blaming something secondary like social media (which - fyi - parents could exert more control over).
Military training stuff has to be accessible. Here's Frank Wilczek:

WHEN I WAS ABOUT TO BEGIN TEACHING at Princeton, my friend and mentor Sam Treiman called me into his office. He had some wisdom to share. Sam pulled a well-worn paperback manual from his desk and told me, "During World War Il the Navy had to train recruits to set up and operate radio communications in a hurry. Many of those recruits were right off the farm, so bringing them up to speed was a big challenge. With the help of this great book, the Navy succeeded. It's a masterpiece of pedagogy. Especially the first chapter. Take a look."

He handed me the book, opened to the first chapter. That chapter was titled "Ohm's Three Laws." I was familiar with one Ohm's law, the famous relation V = IR that connects voltage (V), current (I), and resistance (R) in an electric circuit. That turned out to be Ohm's first law.

I was very curious to find out what Ohm's other two laws were. Turning the fragile, yellowed pages, I soon discovered that Ohm's second law is I = V/R. I conjectured that Ohm's third law might be R = V/I, which turned out to be correct.
That sure is a simple solution! As a side effect, it filters out almost all of the people I actually want to talk to in my day-to-day life.

The inability for partisans of particular technologies to understand that affordances matter more than the technologist's spherical-cow notion of "better" continues apace. And I have some empathy for that viewpoint, too, but I grew out of it as a teenager and I always find it odd that others stuck to it.

If you can't meet people where they want to be, your solution might be simple but your solution isn't good for them and fulminating about it just isn't great.
I had a J1 and I will apply. The website only says ‘resided in us at the time’
Sexual reproduction has big benefits. But clonal populations can do well when their environment gets very stable. Mix it up or suffer the wrath of the clones!
VictoriaMetrics was recommended to me by a contractor and I've been very happy with it as well. It does have an option to push in metrics, which I intend to use with transient environments like CI jobs and the like, though I haven't gotten there yet.
It being apart of the app is what makes it intuitive. Most people don't want to have to go through setting something like that up at the OS level.
> Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it's inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn't have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was

It remains a neat way to get around the display problem, though. Even if most practical work in cyberspace takes place on 2D surfaces, nobody really wants to cart around a pair of 34 inch 4k monitors to work on the go.
That sounds like a big waste of money (I don't think the mixing is even close to 5%) and also just more trouble for the sewage processing plants (which rely on bacteria to clean the sewage!)
Is it really a "horrible thing"?

You yourself mention climate change. There are increasing fights over WATER among PEOPLE [1], even as "freshwater" resources are being utilized to an extent where it's estimated that 1/3 of freshwater species are endangered or at risk of becoming endangered [2], microplastics everywhere [3], OTHER species being accelerated into extinction at a continuously increasing rate in general, etc.

Also, what happened to the "promise of automation" and "promise of mass production"? I thought we were all supposed to be "chillin' on the French Riviera while machines did so much that none of us had to work more than, say, 10 hours per week?" [4] ... I.e., shouldn't we be able to make do with fewer workers?? The even bigger laugh, there, is how much everyone is freaking out about "AI" now.

Decline in fertility in a more "organic" way, now (due to economics, impact of EDCs for years, etc.) is far better (for US, even, as a species) than "keeping the accelerator mashed to the floor as we barrel towards the cliff" [5] (when it'll be "Soylent Green" time for basically everyone, one way or another).

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/04/15/colorado-river-shrinking-cali...

[2] https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-the-north-american-be...

[3] https://www.academia.edu/download/59765553/Human_Consumption...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward

[5] https://youtu.be/BGtEp7zFdrc
I think this is standard and I find it a total and complete waste of my hard drive space.
Based on my own old Twitter circle, I see that:

A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter

B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.

Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).
If the government is using the data to bypass a restriction then that same government is unlikely to create a law to change that.

Seems like a problem that will never be fixed, on purpose.
I generally agree with you, even though I have a soft spot for the 80s-inspired aesthetic that cyberpunk refuses to leave behind. Part of its staying power, I think, is because there simply hasn’t been an alternative “tech aesthetic” with as much appeal since. Devices themselves are no longer sculptural forms but just basic slabs of glass. Nor does there seem to be a relationship between computers and fashion style, as there sort of used to be.

This can also probably be placed in context with the general “death of genre” that has happened since the early 2000s.
Germany specifically gives a lot of incentives, not just money and tax breaks but also subsidized kindergartens, and the numbers are stil poor. Not terrible, but less than adequate. E.g. the typical monthly fee would be enough for two days of kindergarten in Switzerland. So I am not really convinced those incentives work. It's an emotional decision, you either want kids or not. The economical decision is IMHO mostly about how much time you have. E.g. if you work 60 hours a week it will be tough to make that decision.
I'm 35 with two kids, too bad for your ageist argument.

And you don't even need a special kind of bike to carry two kids on a single bike: you can put both a front and back mounted seats on litterally any bike, even foldable ones!

If the infrastructures are adapted, even carrying 4 children on a single bike isn't too big of a deal, especially with e-bikes (you can either use a cargo bike or a trailer and two seats).

Do confuse your lack of imagination for an inherent impossiblity.
Basically anything you can smell is a gas, not particulates.
How about this - allow infinite phone calls and e-mails home. That's it. No need for a startup, VC finding or anything. Just let people call home. I'd prefer for free, but if you need to keep a small monthly or per minute fee, at least just have it cover the costs.
I’m so sad to hear this. I didn’t know him but hugely admired the work he did on Tempest (his recent fork of Sandstorm, attempting to revive the project). Thank you for letting us know.
How many years before you pay off your roof and when will it need to be replaced?
If we allow this logic what is to stop the following situation:

1. Landlord writes into rental agreements that they could have someone inspect the property every year.

2. Sold access to people's apartments to police officers every year.

In this situation a third party secured access to something which is traditionally constitutionally protected. This third party is in a position of power that is hard to bargain with (as many tech companies are). Most people wouldn't agree to this if they had the option to say no and would not expect this lease clause to be used this way.
Most-Favorited Hacker News Posts
This has been posted before but it was a while ago and the articles are very interesting still.
I've been working on it for about a year. At the moment it exists as a git repo (as you say), but for it to be of use you need at the very least the corresponding SqliteDB (~70MB) and to be really fun (and work with the frontend) you need the listing pages themselves (high res and ~50GB), neither of which is in the git repo, I keep them separate.

If you message me privately I'd be happy to share the data. The git repos are:

https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings
https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings-app

I use them for curation at the moment so the READMEs leave ... something to be desired. I hope by the end of August to have a read-only version up and running, although without a wikipedia-like effort I don't see how I would curate it fully so it'll probably always be a little touch and go as to what data is available.

The stats I have from curating are: 369345 individual movie "listing boxes" (I would guess around 98% accuracy, although if I were to field a guess the actual number there should be is probably 400K) of which 321308 are matched to a movie, and 296941 of those are for sure unique. And overall 202203 have channel + time + duration matched up using the VCR listings (which the New York Times conveniently published from around November 20th 1990, and the internet archive very nicely has the program the VCRs used to encode/decode those codes). There are 21530 unique movies at the moment.

If I understand the New York Times correctly, then none of this can be commercialized since I scraped the core data (the pages themselves) from the TimesMachine, so this really is a personal project, which I'm happy to share. I've made a few Letterboxd lists from the corresponding data, for example a series of lists with all of the movies (and play times) for films playing on September 1 in particular e.g. https://letterboxd.com/patsmad/list/television-films-septemb... It is rather consistent, around 100 films a day, for 1990-1999 it was 106, 118, 74, 74, 89, 99, 98, 110, 97, 93. As is obvious I can talk about this for days.

I'm not sure the best way to do private messages, my email is associated with this account, but I have no idea if you can see that. I usually just lurk on HN.
Yes, the Numba use case is a subset of LPython. We want to support what Numba does, that is, you decorate your function and JIT it. But in addition, we also want to compile to binaries (ahead of time) that have no CPython dependency, and support high performance optimizations. Numba speeds up Python a lot, but doesn't seem to quite get the Fortran/C++ level of performance sometimes. One of our main goals is to be able to get maximum performance, so that eventually as a user you can depend on LPython that if it compiles it, it will run at least as fast as C++ or Fortran would.
EU being started in the 1990s was a huge mistake. They need Big Fiscal like the US so they can. get rich again, but their constitution largely prohibits it. If they did an infrastructure build-out it would be amazing cause they are currently way more efficient at building things than we are.
Seems like AI may contribute to emissions with all of the processing that has to be done gathering, formatting, training, and executing these models. Of course, in the long run if AI replaces most of our jobs, the population may drop, reducing emissions.
> beholden to no-one

They're beholden to congress. No US entity is beholden to no-one