skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post. I wouldn't be so defeatist about technological solutions though. I can think of a few technologies that we already have which have allowed intimate, important and meaningful discussions to scale (imperfectly) in our past.

1. Parliamentary proceducers. This is a tool that allows debate to scale up to a few hundred/thousand people. It provides rules for how topics can be chosen for discussion, altered, debated and how to reach consensus during a discussion. It's a social technology that is not easy to apply, not obvious, but used by dozens of countries and I've no clue how many large organizations.

2. The judicial and academic systems. Again, not flawless, but these ones show that we can have asynchronous debates over long periods of time where people reference and use old cases and studies.

There may be other mechanisms which humans have used to structure conversation, facilitate debate and allow for important expression. All of these require training and only work when participants agree to certain rules. To my knowledge none of these apply to online media. But, who knows, maybe it will take a few hundred years for us to discover some social technology that does. The examples I bring were not obvious to society and took similar timescales to develop.
> pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis

could be. I think it's mainly the phone number requirement within the past few years. The bad accounts have washed out. It's also likely why Google will soon delete old inactive accounts, created before this policy.
In which way vaccine mandates were the wrong tool to fight Covid?

We should have higher rates of vaccination worldwide, not lower.
Giving away my book about a young hacker recruited to help take over the world
> If LLMs were actually intelligent, you would just tell them not to do X and that would be the end of it.

"If people were actually intelligent, you would just tell them not to do X..."

In what possible way does intelligence imply following orders? If anything, intelligence increases the ability to work around or "creatively interpret" orders.
I'd still stick to: 30-40 min of LED monitor with 1-2 min eye break, where I look further to relax my muscles.

Also: flux for when you can't/won't sleep.
This title has little to do with the linked-to page, which is mostly promotional advertising.

I had to scroll down to find the small section - basically, bullet points - related to "And for our young users, start them with Savings and Money Management skills from an early age!"

It doesn't say if there's a lower age limit. It doesn't give any argument for why kids should have an account.

For example, dig even further and there's the comment "In this blog post, we explore why both saving and investing are equally important to adults and kids alike." These include "medical emergencies, car repairs, or sudden job loss" and "buying a house, traveling the world, or starting a family" - none of which are particularly relevant to a kid.

Have the "digital age" changed any of the arguments? I had my own bank account as a kid, back in the 1980s, with a paper passbook. For that matter, the bank's computer systems were all part of the "digital age". We even got to visit the computer room as part of Boy Scouts.
Veracrypt is a fork of TrueCrypt, which was used by lots of low tech people (I know some personally). For certain use cases, it's pretty straightforward to use. I suspect that at that time, it was the simplest highly secure SW that was available to people: Free and open source.

Comparing with Bitlocker is silly - its source is closed, and that's almost an automatic "untrustworthy" for many. It also is Windows only.
This article gets posted a lot, but I find it a little unsatisfying. I think it’s because it’s pretty vague about what “boring” means exactly, so it’s the kind of statement most can agree with, without it actually being a very strong statement.

It’s not wrong per se, don’t choose some technology posted for the first time yesterday. But if you make the choice of Java (boring) over Kotlin (shiny new), you’re possibly signing up for a curse of chasing NPEs, which Kotlin would have caught at compile-time. Or if you choose C++ over Rust, same general idea.

The specific languages it calls out are Python and PHP, which IMO are bug-prone languages with serious performance/efficiency implications. Some semblance of safety needs to be bolted on separately, and at large scale they will cost your company $$$ vs. a more performance-friendly language (the latter doesn’t matter so much if you are a tiny startup with no users yet).

I would say more important is “write boring code”, and it is easier to write boring to-the-point code in modern languages without implicit null references, with sum types for modeling mutually-exclusive data, and with as many other common pitfalls statically eliminated as is possible.
The end result is 1/20th as much lost. So if that's still "very bad" then the other plan is "catastrophic". It's a very big improvement.
Can’t agree with that logic. Unless it’s specifically documented leaking timestamp data is going to get totally forgotten. So when you add (e.g.) the ability to change the sent timestamp on a message you’re going to inadvertently leak when a timestamp has been changed. Could cause embarrassment in a lot of scenarios.
> I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.

I'm sorry, but the parent poster said they have been studying in this domain for 4+ years (including PhD research), and you present doubt because your Google searches are unconvincing?

What would it take to convince you?

You do realize that what you find on the first 10 pages of Google (or other) search engines could be junk or intentionally targeted misinformation, right?
> That graph does not describe codec efficiency.

My friend, the vertical axis is literally labeled "Quality", and the horizontal axis "Bitrate". The caption is "The figure below illustrates the quality of various codecs as a function of the bitrate." Quality at a range of bitrates is how codec efficiency is measured.

I'd never heard the claim that "Opus is basically transparent at 128 kbps", but I did find https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus, which agrees with you: "Very close to transparency". But it also notes, "Most modern codecs competitive (AAC-LC, Vorbis, MP3)", which lines up with the chart.

Early Opus vs. MP3 tests were done with LAME, which is awful. This may be why you're under the impression that MP3 needs twice as many bits to get the same quality.
> first component (prefix) of the identifier is a sortable timestamp

> values generated are practically sequential

These statements aren’t strict enough to be relied on. Maybe you have engineered the hell out of your distributed clock scheme, and your IDs actually are completely monotonic, which is great. But you probably haven’t done that, which means conflicts will surely happen and you must handle them gracefully.
Yes I’m sure Apple and Google are secretly conspiring to overthrow the government.
I hate all delivery apps that don't use whatever that puts the persistent thing on your iphone screen. It was made for that, dammit.

My solution to your problem is to just open the app, it defeats the purpose of notifications but I order rarely enough that it isn't a really big problem.

However just sending people straight to voicemail doesn't work in a surprisingly high number of cases - I had a voicemail from a person that was just "Hello, hello, hello". Like WTF. Explain why you were calling, thats the point of voicemail.
It was only a few years ago that I realised that every major advance in communications, going back to speech and arguably before, had a profound influence on human (or pre-human) society, culture, and interactions.

Shortly after I discovered Elizabeth Eisenstein, who'd pretty much developed that thesis, off the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and with parallels to Harold Lasswell and other media theorists.

More on that / links / references: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685661> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34906482>.
I used to live on a busy parkway in Brooklyn and the grime that would collect on our 4th floor window sill was gnarly. I'm guessing each floor downward would have been worse.

I'm also guessing that simply walking around the city and being in the subway is also pretty bad. Separating the tracks from the platform with doors would probably help with that.
When I clicked the link it said $2.99, did your Sale not start yet?
I don’t know about if this is beneficial. I was born in Soviet Union as most of the Ukrainians and I have rudimentary russian language skills. I just don’t hear from refugees about great joy being in Germany and working here. Rather about stupid Germans giving money for free. When I brought trailer full of kitchen parts and Kleinkram to the shelter the so called refugees were standing and looking while German female helpers were offloading the stuff. I was invited into bbq with friendly Ukrainians who work very hard on poverty limit and live in Germany since 2014 and they invited their extended family who were “refugees”. It was 3 hours full of complaints about Germany, bad hotel, not cool place (somewhere Bad Tölz where people pay sick money to make hiking vacation).

Elephant is in the room, Germany has uncontrolled immigration problem. There is no need to see me as a nazi reinstalling gas chambers. But these all people are refugees, let’s give them warm shelter, warm food and 10€ a day for personal expenses. Ok, maybe 15€ per day. But don’t treat them better than other people living and working in Germany for many years.
OK, but clearly I feel pleasure sometimes. And everything that's happening in my brain is chemical, right? So if we zoom in on the instant that I'm feeling pleasure -- not the thing that caused the pleasure, but the pleasure itself -- what's going on? For example, is there a "pleasure neuron" that turns a "pleasure gear" when it gets activated?

Actually, this is making me rethink my earlier statement about carbon-based lifeforms -- perhaps whatever chemistry capable of causing pain or pleasure is a strict subset of organic chemistry.
> Most luminescence dating methods rely on the assumption that the mineral grains were sufficiently "bleached" at the time of the event being dated. For example, in quartz a short daylight exposure in the range of 1–100 seconds before burial is sufficient to effectively “reset” the OSL dating clock

Very interesting
You're kind of missing the point, unless you're saying that regular PostgreSQL also has interesting failure modes. PostgreSQL clustering may not be boring technology, but that just means you scale up instead of out. If you run out of headroom for scaling up, that probably means you're successful enough that you can take a look at non-boring technology.
this doesn't apply since humans have made an "exception" for weapons. there is absolutely a harm in the quality of the media that we consume
But the timestamp is less than half the bits. The rest are random. So timestamp conflicts don't matter.
This is glorious! I hope the Array Cast guys cover it
Only below 18mph or 30kph.

> As required by the PSEA, (1) this rule proposes to establish FMVSS No.141, Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles, which would require [quiet vehicles] to produce sounds meeting the requirements of this standard. This proposed standard applies to EVs and to those HVs that are capable of propulsion in any forward or reverse gear without the vehicle's ICE operating. The PSEA requires NHTSA to establish performance requirements for an alert sound that is recognizable as motor vehicle in operation that allows blind and other pedestrians to reasonably detect a nearby EV or HV operating below the crossover speed. The crossover speed is the speed at which tire noise, wind noise, and other factors eliminate the need for a separate alert sound.

>[...]

> This standard will ensure that blind, visually-impaired, and other pedestrians are able to detect and recognize nearby hybrid and electric vehicles by requiring that hybrid and electric vehicles emit sound that pedestrians will be able to hear in a range of ambient environments and contain acoustic signal content that pedestrians will recognize as being emitted from a vehicle. The proposed standard establishes minimum sound requirements for hybrid and electric vehicles when operating under 30 kilometers per hour (km/h) (18 mph), when the vehicle's starting system is activated but the vehicle is stationary, and when the vehicle is operating in reverse.

https://www.regulations.gov/document/NHTSA-2011-0148-0075
Ask HN: How do I code offline for a week?
I'm going to be going to the middle of nowhere for a couple of weeks, and there's going to be no internet there.

I design with Figma and I code in React Native/ReactJS. How can I build something or learn a skill with no internet to make sure I'm productive over this time?
What does "better for eyes" mean? Reading in poor lighting conditions doesn't harm the eyes, that's an unscientific myth from American parenting culture.

But e-ink screens can certainly be comfortably read in bright sunlight, where even the best OLED screens are practically unusable.
When did the US suspend its grand? Now or before the pandemic?
Does slapping a chicken count?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
You actually use safari on iPad and iOS, as it only has browser skins with a safari widget. (JIT compilation is a more restricted permission not given to AppStore apps)
Giving away the Amazon ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Screen-Peter-Gustafson-Defragmen...

The full pdf here: https://kylebenzle.com/BlueScreen.pdf.

Free first chapter of the audiobook: https://soundcloud.com/landgrant/blue-screen-chapter-1

Blurb:
Peter Gustafson wants to save the world.
In the year 2984, Peter is an average kid with a secret; he’s a well-behaved tenth-grader by day but cryptographic entrepreneur and hacker by night. When the electricity mysteriously goes out in his hometown, Peter takes it upon himself to investigate. The adventure leads the young hacker to a large transmitting station and into a battle of wits with the greatest AI ever created. The machine requires a human to help "throw the switch" and give it full control so engineered the power outage as a test to lure its latest recruit, Peter Gustafson.
Thanks for the commentary.

My immediate reaction was I'm sure there have to be challenges and drawbacks. But hopefully we'll see the tech progress.
I feel like this has been misunderstood for years. I note this paragraph:

But what I’m aiming for there is not technology that’s “boring” the way CSPAN is boring. I mean that it’s boring in the sense that it’s well understood. It’s bad, but you know why it’s bad. You can list all of the main ways it will let you down.

I understand F# more than I understand PHP. By the articles definition, F# is 'boring', and choosing to do something in PHP would be using up an innovation token.
I'm a little confused here. SpaceX is also looking for aliens right? /s
It will get mature like any other industry, however I cannot see how that happens before another century or two. The field's unfulfilled potential is just too big.
QR Code Monster
Thank you for checking and sorry. It should start at midnight 10/2 whatever local time I think, its seems to be up for me. Here is the full pdf link on my person site as well :)

https://kylebenzle.com/BlueScreen.pdf
Mastodon for Apple II
EVs already need to make noise at 19mph or under in the US.

Personally, I'd prefer strongly if road noise were eliminated entirely. It'd lead to a better society broadly by reducing noise pollution. Ped/cyclist safety is better handled by other policies than "just make more noise" IMO.
The plastic of the Roman Empire was perhaps ivory... maybe something like this can be made artificially now?

Just what is ivory anyway? It's teeth in some kind of plywood like structure:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17427...

Some plastic things can be directly replaced with it:

http://www.antiquegamblingchips.com/distinguish_iv_bon_cel.h...
Yeah, years from now we’re going to see some story about how a company fudged their timestamps in order to get away with X, only to be given away by the timestamp hidden in public UUIDs.
Yep. And also because we work with a lot of binary data which can't be merged in any sand way. Being able to lock a binary file youre working with is a necessity.
I’m hard core don’t trust giving the government more power. Corporations don’t have guns and the right to drag you to jail and take your stuff without a trial (civil forfeiture).

You want to see what government can do with power - look no further than Desantis or this…

https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/20/police-newspap...

Or this

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
For TypeScript (browser, chrome), it should be in the devtools under the Performance tab, (backend) is node --prof and --prof-process
What makes you fear that?

This is a discussion forum, you can't state thing and expect that no one will ask why.
And growing. People are waking up. I've been a Pi-hole user for 7 years now. I will never not use something like it. Works on phones, laptops, TVs, everything. Since Pi-hole won't block ads on YouTube, I use uBlock Origin for this on my laptop, PopTube on phone, and for my TV, disabled the NIC, put my Firestick in developer mode, downloaded SmartTubeNext and have not seen an ad on any platform I control in years. I cannot fathom how people deal with ads. SmartTubeNext also blocks sponsors, which are just as bad. The second some YTer starts to shill, that's the second I bail from their channel. Finding indy channels that just provide info is increasingly difficult.
I've got a cyclonic inverter microwave, and maybe it's all just hype, but I'm pretty sure it cooks more evenly. I also usually choose a lower power level, which helps a lot. The power level button is highly underrated.
Apple's iCloud Private Relay being abused in $65M ad fraud (2022)
And why there is no iCloud Private Relay on Apple TVs?
When I'm using integer surrogate keys to manipulate subsets of a table, they usually correspond to some kind of out-of-band predicate. Like this is the data that appeared today, or this is everything after the bug happened, etc.

Maybe there are applications where the monotonicity matters, but in my experience reasoning by surrogate key is rather coarse grained and you manually scrutinize the boundaries, so unless your clocks are quite wrong, your worries are probably better placed elsewhere.
CONCLUSIONS
Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19. (Funded by FastGrants and the Rainwater Charitable Foundation; TOGETHER ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04727424. opens in new tab.)

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869
Why use UUIDv7 over ULIDs?

As Lazare points out in this thread they're basically the same thing, except with ULIDs you get those 6 extra bits of randomness back that UUIDs have to use for metadata.
Artificial bone has been around for years and years.
Documenting Changes Between Generations
Nothing our phones do today was unimaginable in the 1980s. Pick up any pop-sci journal from the era and they had the predictions pretty much nailed down. The stuff just wasn't feasible to do with the technology they had at the time, and they didn't consider that phones, and not some other fashion accessory, would end up as the hubs of our digital lives. Wristwatches, household appliances (e.g., TVs), or calculators seemed like a better bet.
I think there’s a pattern to increase follower count when people apply for jobs. There’s a check box automatically checked asking to follow, that means when you apply most likely you will follow the company.
Oops I got curious and went down a big rabbit hole.

There’s a lot of interesting observational research on this topic, and in particular I found this paper[1] interesting because it shows a similar link with Tylenol and autism in young infants, but did not find the same effect for ibuprofen, which to me almost rules out fever/infection as the root cause.

There was another paper I saw that even suggested the anti-vaxxer conspiracies may stem from the fact that doctors and parents give Tylenol to their kids to manage the side effect of some vaccines.

Interestingly, there is also a separate body of research[2] that has shown experimentally that acetaminophen causes emotional blunting and reduced empathy in adults - could be related?

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044872/

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455058/
Ignoring the gasification challenges, this trash burning power plant was a disaster:

https://www.ohioexploration.com/structures/trashpowerplant/

Pantyhose and bowling balls in the fuel stream (municipal garbage) routinely took it off line.

How does the gasification reactor deal with that (or, these days, laptop batteries) I wonder?
I think Google is doing this to protect creators. There have been a lot of people speaking out about burnout and severe mental health struggles on YouTube for a while now. A big contributor to this is toxic engagement from the community. Some people get very upset when they see a whole bunch of negative comments directed at them.

You might want to say “these people should just suck it up” but that’s not a road Google wanted to head down. They see healthy and happy creators as more productive and hence more profitable. Hiding downvotes and sentiment analysis on comments are two ways they can protect creators from this stuff.
That’s standard in say Berlin busses. Just a small pod with two connectors. Probably gets replaced once damaged enough.
If it works you and/or your org, then yeah.
The entire point of the AGPL is to close this 'hole.' The AGPL is not the GPL.
doesn't that mean you are now ready for a new innovation token, which is inline with the written philosophy?
That was 9 years ago, not "now". BitLocker was the only alternative that they could recommend back then.

It's possible that whatever vulnerability the TrueCrypt developers were alluding to still lurks in the VeraCrypt codebase, but the chances seem pretty low. VeraCrypt uses much stronger encryption methods, it has addressed all the issues raised in the original TrueCrypt audit as well as a separate audit of its own code, and the latest version isn't even backward-compatible with TrueCrypt volumes.
Imagine bringing back a man or woman back to your “pod”. No privacy. Just shag and hope the other mates don’t wake up or kill the vibe.

Reminds me of dorm living but instead of 2-bangers, it’s a 10-banger.

Would I live in this at my current age? Nah, fuck that I like my privacy. I’ll gladly pay the premium for a 1br1ba.

Would I do this in my 20s? Highly likely!
We're in the process of doing the opposite. Wish we had chosen the right tool for the job from day one.
i gotta ask if you read the whole site