skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“I trust everyone, including Google, and I use their services; I just don’t trust the devil inside them.”

I have been a customer of Insync[1] since its early buggy days and have been grandfathered into quite a few licenses. I set it to sync offline of many of my Google drives (which are mostly work-related), and then I asked it to convert my local copy to OpenDocument Format[2]. I sync that local copy to a backup.

I had had enough crashes and data loss in my life to conclude that I needed backups of the backup of the backups. Have backups. Have Time Machine[3] or similar setups for regularly used documents. My daughter thinks I’m a magician when I make her documents fly out and choose the version she lost or wants to recover.

I’ve no affiliations with InSync; I’m just another happy customer.

1. https://www.insynchq.com

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(macOS)
I thought this as well. The answers seems very obvious, so I began to wonder if I’m missing something and it’s actually not obvious.

Yet even if the dust was mostly local, it would still block out light from infinity. Assuming it’s thick enough. But presumably the dust wouldn’t only be local; it could even be worse in other parts of the universe. Essentially we just don’t live in a perfect vacuum. There’s a bunch of crap blocking the light.

I suppose at some point in the history of the universe, there was probably less dust and it actually was much brighter.
root and branch on tax, tends to put you into the loony basket. Not that it isn't a good idea, but a huge number of bizarre ideas lie in "lets reform the tax systems" -and most functional pragmatic politicians limit themselves to promises they think they can win on, instead of ones they know they can't. Uni tax shelter structure is centuries deep at this point. I can think of other low hanging fruit ... churches maybe? ok.. same-same: they have armies of motivatied monomaniacal supporters.

Fans vote.

Obviously, most politicians are insufficiently pragmatic and hitch themselves to any story which will get them airplay time, good or bad.
The low rates was true. But not the 30 year term. Most mortgages in the UK are fixed for 2-5 years so people are much more exposed to fluctuations in interest rates than in the US.
And the explanations also don't even resolve anything. "OK, then where did God come from?" or "OK, then where did the simulation come from?". I just don't see the point.
worked for me in netscape navigator 4.0
New home construction costs are around 60% for labor + materials, with the rest associated with finishing the lot (17.8%), general overhead (5.1%), sales commission (3.6%), financing costs (1.9%), marketing costs (0.7%), and profit (10.1%).[0]

IIRC construction costs are then split 40-50% labor and 50-60% material. So labor is roughly 24-30% of the overall cost.

[0] https://www.nahb.org/blog/2023/03/60-percent-of-home-sales-p...
https://archive.is/SIe26
Convenience and reliability. This is the first major data loss story I've heard related to drive in, what, a decade? 5 years?

On average, I lose two or three local media devices every decade. I will happily outsource that problem to somebody with full-time concerns of backup and restoration. Especially at the price point of free.
De gustibus, and all that. I really liked "Halting State" (especially) and "Rule 34", but most of the others you mention I would not put in any top 100 list. Egan has very outré ideas but isn't much of a writer.

The Martian was OK, good on the science mostly, but ultimately it's just a biography with not much to say about the impact of technology on the human condition.

Forward isn't much of a writer and his ideas are too much weed. Baxter and Robinson I haven't read. I think I started something by Robinson but gave up. And I can happily read Graydon Saunders. (Yes, fantasy, but well written).
At least in Canada, the cost to build a typical home is soaring. A friend in Victoria bought a year ago and wanted another for his parents. An extra 150K for an 800K (originally) home.

Since 2019, construction costs are up 50%.

https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/proof-point-soaring-constr...
> Is it regulations? Or is it home-owners and realtors voting against expanded housing projects?

Those are the same thing. One is a motivation for the other.
Emacs Android native build

However, it's not clear to me how to access a compiler or interpretor other than the Emacs Lisp interpretor. Termux won't install for some reason on my phone.
I like the earlier Civ games, up to around version 4 for this reason. Less complexity and micromanagement.
> No one living in Terra Haute, Indiana would be better off. No one in Boise, no one in Richmond, Virginia.

Why not? They have zoning restrictions there too. Nobody would be building skyscrapers there, but they would be building multi-family homes instead of single-family homes.

The only places it wouldn't matter is where land is really not scarce, i.e. rural areas or cities with long-term negative population growth. But those are the places with the cheapest housing at present -- that's not where the problem is.

> The flip-side of "housing costs too much" is "oh shit, the builders built way too much" and then the economy craters when that does more than just cool, but freezes over for a decade.

What was the date of the last housing crash in the US caused by overproduction of housing?

> What if there are too many people who need goods (homes, of course, but other things too), but who can't ever have viable livelihoods no matter how much low-quality education we stamp on their foreheads with C+ grades? What if UBI doesn't work, because in the part of the economy that is actually worthwhile, there's just not enough excess to tax away and send to them as welfare? What if we're still 150 years away from the technology that would give you your Star Trek post-scarcity utopia?

These things are two sides of a coin. Absent some supervillain extracting the surplus to store in an evil supervillain mattress, automation technology that eliminates jobs also lowers the cost of living.

If things aren't very automated then there is plenty of work to do and plenty of jobs available. If things are very automated then automated production results in cheap goods which allows people to make a living by working fewer hours.

It can even be both at once, because rather than working for fewer hours, people generally prefer to keep working their existing hours and then use the extra money to buy more stuff. Which increases demand, which requires more labor to produce the additional stuff, which creates new jobs. Notice how we've already automated many things that used to be manual and the unemployment rate is still very low.
I'm not sure of that. In Switzerland people vote against their own good by refusing new neighborhoods, high rise building, and constricting constructions to the current extent (and this at all levels city/state/federation). Cost of living is not the main driver as all the projects are refused for quality of life reason, Most people think that the only solution is downsizing the population (good luck with that). I have few hope for an improvement.
Usually the problem isn't the kids but the parents. Educating a child that young is a lot of 1:1 work that takes up a lot of time (like many hours a day spaced with breaks in between) & unless you extract joy and satisfaction from seeing a child master basic skills for the first time, you're probably not going to be good at it. There's also logistical difficulties accomplishing that when you have two people working full time.
In theory all you need is a keyboard and a screen, the other hardware is whatever shape works, right? Coding "on the phone" sounds like a "veritable nightmare" if I'm using the stock screen and "keyboard" solution that is half the visible field. VSCode + SSH lets me code on the cloud box, whatever combination of unlocking/jailbreaking/hardware purchasing gets you that, is a solid way to go.
The simulations aren't nested, they're simultaneous and all under one hypervisor! Maybe one of my old Qubes laptops is running the second layer of the simulation - I should probably turn it back on.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the possibility. In the Australian suburb of Box Hill, the last 20 years have seen an absolute transformation as a low-rise suburb became home to the tallest group of towers outside of the Melbourne CBD. Coupled with a huge influx of migrants, primarily from China, walking around Box Hill at night definitely gives the impression of a Chinese city. Historically these sorts of developments were considered "impossible" and in fact, unwanted in the suburbs. Yet once development planning for the first tower was granted, it was only a matter of time. Given the tendency of first-generation migrants to flock, Asian eateries and other business followed. In the 2021 census, the language most spoken at home by Box Hill residents was not English but Mandarin Chinese.

So never say never.

Please note: the above does not constitute an opinion on whether this has been a good thing or a bad thing for Box Hill. It's a fact that its a thing. The point I'm making is that it's definitely possible for it to be a thing elsewhere too. It all depends on the planning permissions and whether business are incentivised in certain areas.
It’s really sad I think. Most of the people do it because it gives them a sense of importance and authority.
I always took the simulation to mean “society”, nation state norms, gossip about one another, elites… truisms of society being “facts” like GDP, not facts like speed of light.

Like in the “clearly people doing the work is why potatoes are on store shelves, not due to the shareholders of Ore-Ida, which is hallucination.”
Computers are fragile, but they are copyable. Quite easily and exactly copieable.

Consider how books written 1000 years ago still survive today. They were diligently copied. Now compare the effort (and accuracy) of such book copying to computer copying. Next Consider error correction and error detection that is trivially built in to digital data.

Nothing physical is permanent, but with just a little upkeep, information can live indefinitely.
Churches run on donations and most of them are full on charities that give a ton to local and foreign communities. No way you’re taking tax exempt status from them nor should you try. Universities, and especially their sports teams, on the other hand are outright businesses
This would only be true if the arrow of time only moves toward the future. If it also moved backwards, even in a greatly limited manner, you wouldn't need to track everything. You'd basically have infinite storage for a finite amount of data.
Takes 4 minutes to load here!
Seems like sterling advice if you want to make money. On the other hand, if you just love the game (and programming itself), and want to make it accessible to a modern audience, then fill your boots.

In my case, I contacted the original author of a game who kindly gave me his blessing to use a variation of the game's name for non-profit purposes.
Would you also agree that if NFL teams were tax exempt, it wouldn't matter anyways?

I agree that the dollar impact of lost taxes on society is negligible, but the blatant unfairness seems worth fixing.
IIRC this is because the SDK was only ever released for windows by Firaxis (and not at all for VI), and mods of this size would slow down far too much if they were pure LUA.
Reading + building neural nets to play games? Yes! Count me interested.
No it doesn't work like that at all.

I bought a house at the end of 2020 for $430k with a loan of $337k.

I can't borrow more than that now, my real income hasn't increased, I still have the same sorts of liabilities and expenditures that I had then.

So even though my house is now worth maybe $700k, if I want to move, I have to find a house that I can buy for $700k.

I have paid off something like $20k, so maybe I could find a house for $720k and move into it.

Thus the only way I can move into a bigger/better house is to move somewhere that $720k gets you something bigger/better than in my current location.

But guess what? House prices are up everywhere. You might be able to find some lucky arbitrage opportunity, but you're not going to get any sort of noticeable increase in quality and size.

The advantage of owning a house versus renting is therefore not that you benefit from the rising price of houses, but that your buying power moves with the market and your "rent" is limited to the interest you pay on your loan (because you're paying down the principal as well).

When you're renting, you're flushing your money down the toilet plus trying to save enough for a deposit relative to a market price that accelerates well beyond almost everyone's capacity to save.
Not sure if I follow it, because spending too much time there usually postpones discovering a “sudden truth in code” which may refactor the half of what you planned. I prefer to dive into code midway. Prove my assumptions with MVP first.

I didn’t invent nothing better than pen and paper, despite searching for years. Software gets in my way, pen doesn’t. The only thing I adopted is text outlining. It’s basically text structured as a tree.

Tools for planning and design
Pen and paper (don’t get in your way)
Searched for alternatives for years
Text outlining
Text structured as a tree
Useful when tired of writing
Useful for non-linear thinking/planning

My pen and paper workflow is mostly freehand non-strict diagrams and mindmaps, then later tasks with circles and various marks for completion status. I draw a little box in a corner and put the kind of a paper there: arch if architectural, plan for high-level plans, nothing for tasks. Makes easy search when in a stack.

I tried scanning these papers. Nope, even reading them on screen doesn’t work for me.
I found it! It's not screw heads but some spring contacts pushing against the (metal film) back of the display panel. Probably for grounding purposes:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Google+Pixel+8+Pro+Screen+Repla...

Looks like the springs are so stiff they leave an imprint.

Curiously there's a whole lot more of them around the edges but those don't seem to leave imprints.

I can imagine this is annoying though. It's hard to unsee something like this. Like when you get the first scratch on your new phone.
I think it's because house construction techniques haven't improved. Look at cars: back in the old days, cars were hand-built, one at a time, and were horribly expensive. Then Henry Ford utilized the assembly line process and made car assembly much more efficient: instead of laborers sitting around waiting for other workers to get their part done, everything was organized to maximize labor utilization.

Houses aren't like this: they're still made with the same primitive construction processes used centuries ago, by people who are all semi-independent contractors and not an organized labor force.

If houses were made in factories the way cars are, you wouldn't be complaining so much about construction costs. Sears tried addressing this problem over a century ago with their famous kit homes, to an extent (by standardizing and factory-izing much of the carpentry work and then delivering the parts to the site to be assembled more quickly by local labor), but those are gone now for whatever reason and the industry returned to doing all the labor on-site.
Sportsball needs to die.
The argument presented above rules out a infinite chain of simulations inside simulations. It may still be possible to have a finite chain of simulations, where the fidelity successively decreases. At some point down the chain the simulation can't have enough capacity anymore to contain conscious beings, which wonder, whether they live in a simulation.
I purchased an external 4TB SSD and I make a point of backing my stuff up offline (downloading via Takeout) every few weeks just in case some catastrophic accident happens on Google's end that results in my data being permanently deleted.

I store the local drive in a "fireproof" safe (note: fireproof is a bit of a misnomer, since stuff can still burn in a fireproof safe, though it's a better bet than not having one in the case that your home/apartment catches fire).

I also back up to Amazon Glacier as a third offsite backup. One could also use S3 for this, though it might be a bit more expensive than Glacier.
I wouldn't trust that people clicking yes actually believe we live in a simulation. There's a funny aspect to joust about that, to pretend you believe it, even discuss that you believe that, even if to your core, you don't.
Problem solved: don't have children! (Just look at the current birthrates.)
Is this even a fair comparison? Cognitive abilities and emotional proclivity seem to be unrelated.
Prices go up there too, though. We moved to a little tiny town in the middle of nowhere in 2020 and our house has nearly doubled in value.
You have to be in a really.safe place to feel comfortable walking around with your laptop and a bunch of other stuff just out in front of you like that. Having a standing desk with a small treadmill I could understand. This? It's a silicon valley bit.
> I didn’t see why my boyfriend couldn’t tolerate living with a dog.

She admits the dog is difficult and yet doesn't see why the boyfriend didn't like it. This screams of bad faith and gaslighting. The boyfriend dodged a massive bullet and the woman got a horrible dog in exchange.
> What does Malthus have to do with Marx?

Overaccumulation ("when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy") is analogous to starvation (population growth > food supply growth).

It turns out we were able to both increase food supply more than Malthus expected and the profitable investment outlets more than Marx expected. (We're also better at moderating population growth and destroying surplus capital than either expected. Both predicted proximate doom where it didn't appear.)

Malthusianism and Marxism are also both discredited (albeit not useless) economic models from empirical and theoretical perspectives.
My favorite exchange on the topic from "Matter" by Iain M. Banks where one character explains their argument, based on morality, for why he believes they are living in the base layer of reality and not a simulation:

Xide Hyrlis: "War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale."

Choubris Holse: "Of course, your god could just be a bastard."
Very rarely do house prices go up in a vacuum. Your house went up but so did the one you want to upgrade to. So it's $1m mortgage now for a basic house in a less than desirable suburb, which is very common now for the median home in Sydney.

People seem to think they will downsize and cash out their gains, but very few do. Australian cities are at a minimum 1000km apart, if you actually want a good price differential you are going to Perth, that's over 5000km away (NY to London) so you are a long way away from any friends and family you might have.
Thanks for sharing. There's a time and place for belief based on subjective experience. That's nearly all the time, but many don't accept that :)

The idea that people shouldn't take you at your own word in order to accept your belief is interesting, though. The religion was pretty much word of mouth for most of its spread. Why not from you?

This is most definitely not snarky. You piqued my interest and I try to work out my doctrine with fear and trembling ;)
'Nuts and Bolts' Review: The Levers That Move the World
We do it together. It's just a few minutes a day. Like brushing teeth, something you just have to do, but he usually enjoys it.

Regular Anki for iPad, Linux, MacOS, synced. Whatever device is handy.

I do the card entry. He just answers.
So you retire to some rural community where there's no services, and the local hospital has either closed or has terrible service because all the competent nurses and doctors have left, right when you're getting old and need a lot more healthcare services.
Heh, you do realize that we live in a quantum supercomputer that computes at 10^50 Hz/Kg and 10^34 Hz/Joule?

The wave particle duality is just a min-decision/min-consciousness optimization.

Church-Turing thesis has no sign of being wrong - the maximum expressiveness of this universe is captured by computation.

The most complex theorems of the generalization of mathematics, computation, are actually about what would happen in formal systems, which physical systems are... So high complexity truth is... Simulcrums like Truman Show. Have fun, ahh
The housing crisis of 2008 was probably one of the most economically destructive events in Spain, where I'm from. On the runup to 2008, you would hear stories of people buying a home and it going up 10-20% year over year. You'd literally be an idiot not to buy the most expensive home you could afford as fast as you could (facilitated by 100% mortgages from banks).

The rest is history. People were flipping homes and making bank until the financial sector melted down, and then they couldn't. These days prices still haven't recovered to their peak level. People might not be getting those mind boggling ROI buying homes, but in general is more affordable to do so, and many people seem happy about it.
People have to live somewhere, so they might live in them begrudgingly, even though they'd rather live in higher quality dwellings.
There are good screens and bad screens.
No it was from a supplement trade publication.
> As of 2019 it was a robust backup process with a pain in the butt restore process.

Would love some more insight on this! Anything or any article you can share on how this is implemented at such scale?
People that downsize to tiny or old homes win. The only way to win is not play the game and move to somewhere in the Midwest.

> The phrase "Kobayashi Maru" has entered the popular lexicon as a reference to a no-win scenario. The term is also sometimes used to invoke Kirk's decision to "change the conditions of the test."
Reddit throttled its API usage a month before the great 3rd party purge, so I'm guessing whatever collection method that site was using simply doesn't work correctly anymore. Or worse yet, the remnants of the API spits out completely incorrect data itself.

Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
Stupid question maybe. Do one’s gmail attachments live on your Google Drive? This would be a separate system no? (Eg I don’t normally attach things via Google drive nor put attachments there when gmail tries to encourage me to do so..)
It’s an app for spaced repetition, but it also means “memorization” in Japanese.