skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tl;dr = I think we should all be skeptical of any gun-related data in the US.

I don't doubt the narrative in the article, but I'm skeptical about the data used. For years, my impression has been that gun advocates in the US have done everything they can to prevent any sort of data collection and/or analysis wrt to anything related to guns (ownership, usage, and gun-related deaths). I think this is based on the fear that the data will be used to take everyone's guns (either the FBI will start kicking down doors and seizing guns, or law makers will use the data to help pass gun restrictions). Furthermore, I don't know much about the CDC's "WONDER" database, but I can see where a gun-related death could be reported simply as an "accidental death" or something like that in certain counties, and as such, that wouldn't show up as gun-related in the "WONDER" data.
By far the easiest win would be to enforce laws more strictly against people who have proven themselves to be violent.

Many homicides are committed by people who already have a violent past or other very troubling crimes. Putting them in jail, and preventing them from purchasing guns for at least some time after release, would dramatically bring down homicide numbers.

And once they are a prohibited person, if you find them with a gun put them in jail again.

No constitutional challenges and no new laws even need to be passed. Just police and DAs doing their jobs.

Unfortunately in a lot of cities the clearance rate on murders is pathetic. In Chicago it's about 50%, and it's only that high because so many suspects are found dead.

https://wgntv.com/news/wgn-investigates/rise-in-cpd-murder-c...
I'm vaguely interested in the quotes you mean. That said, I do still get the impression you are talking passed me. Do I think they would have rather kept more favorable terms for themselves? Almost certainly. Do I think they made silly jabs around this? Again, almost certainly.

But I find the need for mustache twirling villains throughout the entire chain of the studio to be unlikely. (Note that this does not preclude that there could be some ridiculous personalities there.)
In my experience ray in AWS is a good way to badly utilize resources and waste a lot of money (as is generally anything cloud or anything python; when you do both it multiplies).

I'd rather have a real HPC cluster.
Work on revenue-generating projects/products. When push comes to shove, cost centers are cut first. If you work on search ads at Google, you have a lot of job security. I wouldn’t want to work on customer support tools there…
At this point autonomous cars have been in multiple incidents that have blocked traffic, impeded emergency access vehicles, and now sat on top of accident victims. I understand it can be tricky with multiple human orgs and interactions in play but, the time to sort it out is now at limited scale. It only gets harder to implement reasonable standards later.

A rolling camera laden sensor platform seems like a poor target for vandalism - a simple label with: recording starts when emergency controls are accessed would seem to discourage most & the car doesn't need to move fast or far for emergency situations.
There is a strong link between poverty and crime within a society but that strong link starts to weaken when you look across different societies, especially in the same region. And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological need like housing, medication, or food.

There are many traits that increase both your risk of poverty and criminality, such as poor impulse control.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc
Bonus points for the actual OP posting an archive link :)
It's easier to get a desired result in fields like psychology and educational sciences, since it's so hard to control the experimental setting. To add insult to injury, this makes that even when done correctly, studies often don't generalize.
The Gnu dialect is assumed if you don't specify arguments, hence default.
It’s called predatory pricing. Pricing products to eliminate competition is illegal.

If you sell Widgets and Sprockets, but you have a competitor that only sells Widgets, you can price of your Widgets so low (on 1-2% margins, for example) that the competitor is unable to compete and goes out of business because you can use Sprocket sales to keep your company in business during that time.

Now that the other company is out of business, the price of your Widgets doesn’t matter because you no longer have competition in the market. You’re getting 100% of the potential sales and despite selling on a lower margin, you’re sales volume is now way up making those margins acceptable.

You don’t have to worry about making a better Widget, or improving the Widget making process, because you have no competition. And you’ve priced yours so low, no other company can come in and attempt to enter the market because they can’t compete at your volume and margins.

If there’s a high-demand material needed to make a Widget, you can put pressure on the producer to lower material prices since you are now their primary customer, or purchase the company that produces it and prevent access to the material.

Predatory pricing consolidates market control and can be used to prevent access to the market. Anti-trust laws were designed to prevent this.
> it's taking away the rest of the prime of his life

Oh man, that hurts, ha! In 15 years he'll still be younger than I am today. I know I'm old, but still, ouch.
Sure I never said "all sex workers are desperate", I said "in many cases". There was a great book I read a while back "Revolting Prostitutes" which talks about this distinction between types of sex workers. There are many, many sex workers who are perfectly happy doing their work, and I believe that these are the people you know (the book gives this group the tongue-in-cheek name "happy hookers"). However on the whole these people tend to be affluent and well-connected (which could also be extrapolated from knowing an HN poster), and as such get over-represented in our current sex-work discourse IMO. Responses like this, which use these "happy" sex workers to push back on the negative aspects of sex work experienced by people who are acting out of desperation obscures a lot of important nuance at play. No doubt that the moralizing "all sex workers are abused and need saving" is equally if not more harmful, but I think it's really important that we acknowledge that for many people sex work is often just that: work (which is also the take of "Revolting Prostitutes"). Understanding it as a form of labor, subject to all the usual abuses of labor plus the extras unique to sex work is IMO a really important framing for thinking about sex work as a crime. This is where I'm coming from when I describe "many" sex workers as "desperate"; they are people who really need income doing the best work they can find (either best pay, most flexible hours, etc). Not trying to condemn anyone for their choice of career or side-hustle, but ignoring the reality that many sex workers are exploited by their employers and clients is IMO far more rude than my previous comment
I thought arrow functions were just designed to reduce verbosity and make code easier to read. Is there another reason?
Goats sin?
> Start migration, create transaction and locks

If you do that on a table or two with millions of rows, you've effectively locked your database from all other access, even SELECTs.

ALTER statements typically grab exclusive locks, blocking both writes and reads. Chain a couple together and you're looking at high CPU, queued queries, and an unresponsive database for hours.

Once you realize what's happening and kill the migration in a panic, it may take tens of minutes or more for the DB to revert back to its initial state, much to everyone's impatient horror.

In simple programs and databases, everything is possible and quick. Complex programs and large databases disabuse you of your naïveté with a quickness.

I love Postgres's transactional DDL, but as the article's mention of renaming columns highlights, one transaction simply isn't enough for the job.
Then who's going to do the mining? Adults? Do you want your iPhone, your car, your video games, your shoes, your plane trips, or not? All that stuff is gonna be "cost prohibitive" if all of these quarry kids go to school and all if these factory workers go home early. Cause: These unfortunate saps work 14 hours a day, eat straw, and have the philosophical thoughts whipped out of their brains. Effect: We live like kings and post all kinds of philosophy online. Don't believe me about this causality? Good, then we can go back to living like kings. You keep posting about ethics, and I'll keep posting about epistemology.
Personally I like the ability to choose where I work (trust/freedom).
It’s definitely helped spread it. But honestly, these situations are nothing new. Back in the dot-com crash I remember it all being the same. Even entry level school computer labs were requiring CS PhD’s! And women, well, same.
> Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom.

All states are at least seemingly concerned with balancing the collective and individual freedoms. Western ones just have the arrogance to claim they do it the best. If it's any consolation the chinese claim the same.
I don't know much about Liquidbase, but I believe it doesn't support accessing both the old and the new schema versions at the same time? (I could be wrong here)

Backfilling happens in batches, we use the PK of the table to update all rows, a trigger is also installed so any new insert/update executes the backfill mechanism to update any new column.

More details can be found here: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll/blob/main/pkg/migrations/ba...
> The compression speed is only 30% slower because that benchmark includes the time to tar the directory, which is likely more expensive than the compression itself.

Amdahl's Law in action.
So THAT'S why they all say not to use phones while filling up ...
I don't believe that two wrongs make a right. I also don't believe the world is a video game where "suffering points" are counted. I of course feel bad for any victim of a violent crime like murder or rape, but I don't really see how it benefits the world to have the rapist "suffer at least for a comparable length of time as the victim".

A rapist should obviously be put in jail to prevent them from raping other people, so I'm not saying that they should be free from consequences, but no, I don't think the world is better place because we have a bureaucratic reenactment of "I Spit on Your Grave".

Maybe in some isolated case a violent offender will feel the punishment and pain they're getting and then empathize and feel like they brought it on themself, but I think in a vast majority of cases, the offender has already rationalized what they're doing and just gets increasingly mad at the system.

How exactly would you even measure a "comparable length of time of suffering"?
I'm really confused. It sounds like you're trying to make some point like, "it should be obvious what I meant", since it's obvious what the letter 'l' means. But it isn't obvious to me at all what the question mark meant, which is why I asked. Maybe you took my question as sarcasm.
From what I've read, all streaming services make more profit from their ad tier than their no-ad tier, so they are all going to be raising prices on their no-ad tier in an attempt to force people into the ad tiers.

IMO, this has nothing to do with the strike, though making it look like it does might deflect customers' attention.
It is very difficult to get out of a federal sentence without serving at least 85% of it. That's with good-behavior credits.
They could ban and phase out systems with unsecure bootloaders. That would go a long way. Many vendors have already locked down their boot process.
You're reducing WFH to just avoiding a commute. In my case, I found that WFH only was isolating, impacted focus, and cut me off from the information flow of the organization, something electronic means cannot really substitute. I have a sense of being more involved and informed about the business instead of being plugged into the Matrix and receiving a paltry trickle of information over narrow channels. The benefits of hybrid for me offset the burden of commuting enough to justify coming in.
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.) occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder.

Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. I have no info on addicts, but I doubt most of them commit crimes either aside from dealing.

Antisocial behavior is the common denominator.
Definitely agree. In my mid-20s I was at a startup. Without any exaggeration, every job I've had since then links directly back to that first company. Somebody I worked with then has a problem now that needs solving, and remembers how I helped with their problems at the time.
I’m very happy to see FPGA emulation being picked up by a company who sells in larger volume. The boutique prices for NES FPGA emulation don’t really make sense to me.
"...to make people emotionally think 8 year old are blowing their brains out."

Which is unfortunately happening all too often ^^^ (IMHO, once is "too often".)
>> Collusion requires the other party to be in on it.

The other party is being tested for cooperation. Amazon raises the price and then reverts if competitors don't follow suit. They didn't revert after seeing sales drop or something, it sounds like they reverted based on a lack of "cooperation" from competitors.

This is tricky stuff to define wrong doing. What if a company wants to see the going rate for a product and just looks to Amazon to get an idea? You know, because a lot of people will shop at Amazon by default unless there is a reason not to, like saving a bit of money. These kind of algorithms become anti-consumer the more they get automated, but they may seem reasonable on the surface or in isolation.

If two algorithms are fine in isolation, but when used together cause overall market prices to rise what should we think of that? In the above example, Amazon would raise their price and the competitor would follow but not quite to the level of Amazon. Then if markets really are competitive (and fast) someone else may step in at a lower price than either, but I don't believe a lot of markets are fast or efficient when it comes to lowering prices.
Er, we had the internet during the dot-com crash. And before it, even.

As I recall, things were not quite so bad in the 1980s. I vaguely recall seeing the odd newspaper article about the intense interest in a job, because it attracted maybe 500 applications. That was newsworthy.
“in cities where the hotel business is very active” I really agree with my understanding of the comment referenced in #3. I understood it as whole apartment rental vs hotel. Not room in apartment vs hotel. I would assume seriously cash constrained people would simply opt for room in apartment, which could be a nice deal. but for those who actually need a whole private apartment for some reason, the difference between that price and a nice hotel just isn’t enough to offset the roll of the dice aspect of Airbnb. City specific and imho, but I’d agree it’s accurate for nyc pretty generally.
Hofstadter's article is very interesting and delightful (as is typical of him). But as a response to Knuth's article it's basically reacting to a straw-man or misunderstanding: by "a metafont" in "The Concept of a Meta-Font"[1] Knuth simply meant a common description of many related fonts in a family (like the Computer Modern family where different font sizes, bold, italics, sans-serif, typewriter style etc are all generated from common code and tweakable knobs) — this is a consciously chosen and designed family. But when he joked about

> The idea of a meta-font should now be clear. But what good is it? The ability to manipulate lots of parameters may be interesting and fun, but does anybody really need a 6⅐-point font that is one fourth of the way between Baskerville and Helvetica?

Hofstadter ran with it, imagining Knuth to mean a single universal "metafont" from which every single font can be achieved by suitable tweaking of knobs. This is of course nonsense.

Knuth wrote a (little-known or referenced) short response in the same journal's Vol. 17 No. 4 (1983): Volume 17.4 (p 412, or in the PDF page 89 of 96 at https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/issue/view/364/183) [from the tone I imagine him very annoyed :-)]:

> I never meant to imply that all typefaces could usefully be combined into one single meta-font, not even if consideration is restricted to book faces. For example, […] Meanwhile, I'm pleased to see that my article has stimulated people to have other ideas, even if those ideas have little or no connection with the main point I was trying to make. Misunderstandings of meta-fonts may well prove to be more important than my own simple observations in the long run.

Returning to the thread a bit, all these “write code to draw an image” systems—like Metafont/MetaPost, Asymptote, TikZ (and also I guess DOT/Graphviz, Mermaid, nomnoml, …)—are IMO interesting as a way for those who think in language / symbols / concepts to do visual stuff (and vice-versa to some extent), and also (along Knuth's lines) “truly understand” shapes by translating them into precise descriptions. Metafont was never going to become popular expecting font designers to write code (and the fact that hand-writing SVG is a negligible fraction of usage makes sense), but now that LLMs can help translate back-and-forth, it's going to be interesting to see if we ever get to “understanding” shapes.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220629082019/https://s3-us-wes... / https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5329/4193
I didn't get that at all, but that's an interesting idea. I'm not sure how the rest would work, you would have to see the screen.

With a keyboard I guess you could use a sequence to pop up certain windows and run certain commands.
Training an AI until it beats me in Trackmania [video]
Bullshit. Mental Health is best when you can pick where to work, which is almost always remote. Commute is so detrimental to mental health, especially until we'll have the so-much-promised self-driving cars.
The ports and hinge shouldn’t fail within the lifetime of a laptop. Sure occasionally you’ll get a defect, but the average experience should be that nothing needs replacing other than physically damaged parts from misuse.
Pretty damning, I'm ready to switch to something else. Bing..? Lol, it's now somehow seeming more palatable.
Algebra that you can do in your head is still algebra.
Hi, I am the author. For text-to-SVG, check out IconShop [1]. It was the paper that I tried to reproduce results from initially. In the paper, there is a comparison of their approach against using GPT-4 [2].

Using vectorisation tools like potrace, is indeed a much more popular approach, and there are quite a few papers generating fonts this way. The most recent I believe is DualVector [3]. But I tried to approach the problem from another angle.

[1]: https://icon-shop.github.io

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.14400.pdf

[3]: https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2023/html/Liu_Dual...
Depends on how much shared entropy your data has. Could you test this by trying to compress all your content into one stream (shared dictionary) compared to compressing it into separate streams (no shared dictionary)?
Specific example aside, it really feels as if Google search returns are just a huge collection of edge case handling, to the point where the underlying product barely even works anymore.
https://archive.today/w1M5L
This seems like an improvement over my current solution in that it can keep multiple projects open simultaneously and route to each of them, but does add more complexity to the setup.

I'm using Dnsmasq (https://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html) to map anything at .lo to the currently running project, like so:

brew install dnsmasq
sh -c 'echo "address=/.lo/127.0.0.1\naddress=/.lo/::1\n" > /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf'
sudo mkdir -p /etc/resolver
sudo sh -c 'echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1\n" > /etc/resolver/lo'
sudo brew services start dnsmasq

Would love to expand on that to route to specific projects, but since it's working "well enough" I probably won't touch that for the foreseeable future.
Why Are Rails Shaped Like That? [video]
That's a lot of data that you're not paying for...
I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules. Punishment causes damage to society beyond just the individual being punished. Criminals have jobs, families and relationships with people who haven't broken the law. Punishment should be used sparingly as the cost to all of society is high. I also believe we'd have lower crime if the massive budgets currently being used on police would be instead used to improve the health and welfare of high crime communities.
Very much agreed. But to the original point, it's about finding a balance. Just like imprisoning people for long periods isn't always conducive to stability, neither is a society full of addicts who struggle to hold down a job or take care of their family. It shouldn't be characterized as an either/or but as finding a reasonable balance.
I appreciate the feedback - you're right I'm not familiar. I appreciated learning that.
Because they have no idea of what they are doing. At best they are copying others but most likely they are afraid you will not be working without someone looking over your shoulder. A lot of times they do it as staging theater for investors (look at my team working in a cool hub) others to impressive customers (having an address in a locale is part of branding). No one does it for better ideas. Cheaper to fly everyone for a retreat if that was the case.
I don't know about other distros, but Debian makes it extremely easy to download both the binary package and the source package. For instance, on the page for the jq package [1], you can download the source using the links down the right-hand side, which includes the full test suite. The key, in my view, is that Debian has a nice way to associate both the final output artefact and the source (both the original source and their patches) with a specific version.

[1] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/jq
For some reason, searching for conversions can fetch the wrong result for me. But writing the conversion in the search in for Google Chrome (and waiting for the response) is always correct.
It isn't a fear, it's reality. This past winter, the ATF issued a regulation—without any action by Congress—that retroactively turned millions of Americans into felons unless they gave up or destroyed their firearms or applied for a special permit and consented to being tracked by the government. Challenges are working their way through the courts (and so far not friendly to the ATF), but that takes time, and in any case, doesn't change the fact that they are trying to take Americans' guns.

You should very much doubt the narrative in the article. Violent crime in the United States is very much trending downward. Even the crazy riots of 2020, while an uptick from 2019, were nothing compared to 1991.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
I think we are using the same word to reference two different things.

Equity increasing in value, as has been discussed on HN multiple times, is not a guarantee - and businesses engage all kinds of other businesses for all kinds of help.

There are lots of ways to structure a temporary engagement that's mutually beneficial to both parties - in the short & long term.
Unless it is self defense. https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/20/us/new-york-bikers-attack/ind...
Firefox's refusal here makes me respect the browser even more and makes me more happy that it's my browser of choice.

User agency should be prioritized over all other concerns.