skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Dave, nice to see you. Our quantum computer discussions go back to 2006 and as a member of the Google team you can certainly tell us about your perspective and personal angle if you were involved in one of the two recent assertions.

It is disappointing that you endorse Scott's uncalled for and a little juvenile analogy. I think it is a wrong analogy weather I am right or wrong (both on the general question of quantum computation and on the specific question of my evaluation of the Google supremacy efforts).

In any case here is my response to Scott's comment:

"Hi everybody,

1) I found the analogy in #39 offensive and inappropriate.

2) As I said many times, I don’t take it as axiomatic that scalable quantum computing is impossible. Rather, I take the question of the possibility of scalable quantum computing as one of the greatest scientific problems of our time.

3) The question today is if Google’s current fantastic claim of “septillion years beyond classic” advances us in our quest for a scientific answer. Of course, we need to wait for the paper and data but based on our five-year study of the 2019 Google experiment I see serious reasons to doubt it.

4) Regarding our claim that the fitness of the digital prediction (Formula (77)) and the fidelity estimations are unreasonable, Scott wrote: “And, far from being “statistically unreasonable,” this exponential falloff is precisely what the simplest model of the situation (i.e., independent depolarizing noise on each qubit) would predict. You didn’t predict it, because you started from the axiom that quantum error-correction had to fail somehow—but the rest of us, who didn’t start from that axiom, did predict it!”

Scott, Our concern is not with the exponential falloff. It is with the actual deviations of Formula (77)’s predictions (the “digital prediction”) from the reported fidelities. These deviations are statistically unreasonable (too small). The Google team provided a statistical explanation for this agreement based on three premises. These premises are unreasonable as well and they contradict various other experimental findings. My post gets into a few more details and our papers get into it with much further details. I will gladly explain and discuss the technical statistical reasons for why the deviations are statistically unreasonable.

5) “Yes, IBM’s gate fidelity is a little lower than Google’s, but the exponential falloff pattern is the same”

Scott, do you have a reference or link to this claim that the exponential falloff pattern is the same? Of course, one way (that I always suggested) to study the concern regarding the “too good to be true” a priori prediction in Google’s experiment is to compare with IBM quantum computers."
Queers always lead the way, without queers bluesky never would have taken off
>And the whole part of cooking is experimenting.

Ummm no. Not unless you are already very knowledgeable and experienced in cooking.

I cook nearly every meal I eat BTW.
As a fan of Waters I would add The Final Cut to that list.
He's 18.
I don't think it's part of the terminal emulator (e.g. xterm, gnome-terminal) but the shell (bash, zsh, etc.). You're correct that it's not something that's implemented as an external program though; the "current directory" is state for a currently running terminal session, so changing that state is done via the shell interface (either directly by built-in commands like cd or indirectly via external commands that use those transitively).
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42106623, which was posted first.
Ask HN: How can you check whether a MacBook Pro turns off screen when closed?
It may not turn off the screen if there is a hardware or software issue. So is there a way to check?
Yeah, I get that. Once you've accepted death is inevitable, you start to think carefully about what kind of death you want.

My parents both died of glioblastomas, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. As the surgeon explained after the biopsy, "This is what you will die from." 3 months from diagnosis to death for my mom, a year and change for my dad. Seeing that process up close made very clear to me what I wanted for myself.

All of this was reinforced for me by the experience of Brittany Maynard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany_Maynard

She was diagnosed with a glioblastoma and was given 6 months to live. She moved from California to Oregon so she could die in a controlled and humane manner. She wrote about that here: https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/opinion/maynard-assisted-suic...

I get the thought of medically-assisted suicide wigs some people out, and we have to be careful to make sure the urge isn't just a temporary distortion of mood and thought. But having seen it up close, I am very much not interested in spending months dying slowly and dragging my family through hell just to make sure random people not involved don't have to think about hard things or deal with their feelings about death.
The sun will disappear on August 12, 2026 over Western Europe, unless the locals agree to give me treasure
Burn Out, Wellness In
I get lots of questions about burnout. Many white-collar athletes struggle to keep up with their motivation to maintain the relentless pace. They work hard, spending more time with their bosses than their partners and families. In the end, it costs them their mental health, leading to chronic stress.

In negotiations, we always try to avoid leaving money on the table. Yet, this reality leaves both money and health on the table. Consequently, these smart and hardworking teammates fade away. Companies lose talent, money, and brilliant minds.
Took me dad in the war yeah
Recent and related:

A stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42106623 - Nov 2024 (39 comments)

The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057139 - Nov 2024 (188 comments)
Again with this drama. Does this company never learn to just shut up already. They don't like that WPEngine made more money And wanted a piece of pie. Now claiming it's a trademark issue. When it stated that "WP" was not trademarked.

> Matt blocked WP Engine’s convenient access to resources he was under no obligation to provide such as the WordPress.org plugin directory

Just like WPEngine was under no obligation to pay towards Automattic.

I didn't think things could get more petty. It's infuriating and gives open source a bad name. "It's open untill we say so"
Yeah, I saw The Wall in college and once was enough for me.

I think your analysis of Waters is spot-on, as I've just introduced my teens to Dark Side (which they love) -- it's nice to have skipped it until my mid-50s, and now fully enjoy it and not be burned out on it.

And our daughter appreciates Animals as well. Thanks for the recommend on Meddle.
> Please don't trivialize peoples stuggles by offering pithy anecdotes.

I think you're mistaken, I didn't trivialize anything.

If anything's being trivialized, it was the value of quadriplegic people, who some internet rando blithely declared as all being incapable of having a "fulfilling life."
You might be surprised that https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/ exists, the 'sister' project OpenStreetMap...
Should the doctor have control over his life? Or just his patients?

And how exactly is the doctor supposed to distinguish between those who have a “0%” chance of changing their mind and those who have a 1% or 5% or 10% chance of changing their mind?
My daily average isn't too much better and I have no concerns. I know that the time not spent writing code is spent reading code, working within processes that ensure security/quality/performance/whatever, improving my skills, or any other number of things that ultimately make the value of that code worth far more than it would without that rigor.
Many thanks for the offer! I have a few old ones, too. I'm sure I have seen .bin files with dumps.
Maybe here: https://home.snafu.de/wahlm/tfdownload.html

There was some bad blood between Wa8DED and NORDLINK/TheNET about copying, maybe best to contact WA8DED directly, or the NORDLINK guys.

https://w5yi-vec.org/W5YI_Reports/1988/1988-06-01_W5YI_repor...

Then again, maybe it would be better to jump on the LoRA bandwagon and make something similar work with meshtastic: https://github.com/TheCommsChannel/TC2-BBS-mesh
The others are really not necessary from a technical pov, could have suicide pill vending machines around the place.
Grown adults are prevented from making decisions all the time. Wearing a seat belt for example. Why should it be OK to force someone to wear a seat belt all of the time, but not OK to have a waiting period if someone decides they want to die?
He thought he had escaped Beijing's clutches only to vanish back into China
Yes, I know very little other than that he was a cancer "survivor" - he wasn't about to die of cancer imminently but I think he had some sort of long-term ongoing health issues. But he was apparently well enough to drive a car!
If we are now needing VR goggles because we can't make irl friends, something has gone terribly wrong.
John Wheeler?
The post I responded to stated "Even hunters forget that when you kill a doe, you are killing 4-8 future deer, not just the one today." as if this was a general truth, outside the context of your thought experiment.

The article is about if some game (specifically unwanted meat) can help feed some people.

If the conversation is about if we can feed the entire US population on wild deer, then of course not. The numbers dont work. The numbers don't work out because there isn't enough carrying capacity, not because it is impossible to kill a doe without lowering yield per sector.
My mother passed from Alzheimer's. There was a few-month period in the middle-end phase where she no longer had the capacity for long-term fear or existential dread, but was still able to eat food and listen to music. What remained of her was reasonably content until things progressed. Happy? No, not really. But it was a lull in the storm of pain that preceded and followed. A silver lining to the mushroom cloud.
No, it’s because Kirk respected Scotty and gave him leeway.

Picard is the meathead, if anyone, and actually watching all the episodes in detail and figuring out their characters you’ll realise that Kirk is twice the scholar and then some Picard pretended to be, especially accounting for the movies and later series. Kelvin timeline doesn’t count, of course.

Kirk >>> Picard.
It is strange these "drones" can fly over US airbases and the world super power can do nothing about them. If GF parked a mothership today it would cause mass delusions and chaos due to human programming. They approach softly and slowly and dont violate free will. This phenomena will only get more and more widespread because it is time...
https://x.com/Kabamur_Taygeta/status/1867170042695061603
The Supreme Court then?
My bio father (he was not a part of my life, which is important to note when you get to the end of this comment) lived to 89, for certain values of "lived". He had long ago exhausted his ability to support himself financially, he was blind, deaf, unable to get around town on his own, had substantial age-related mental health issues, as well as a litany of small but significant health issues. I cannot speak for him, but I'd like to think that if I came anywhere close to that existence and I had the option available, I would opt for an end on my terms that respected my dignity and that of my family. As an American, however, I expect to die like he did: poor, mostly alone, and in pain.
Strong Advice (2021)
NYPD warns about threats to executives
It seems `map` should have less restrictive semantics (specifically ordering) than `for`, does that allow more optimization? I don't know much about Rust internals.
> I don't think this is easily resolved.

It is technically resolvable. Just insist on Lean (or some other formal verifier) proofs for everything.

It looks to me like math is heading that way, but a lot of mathematicians will have to die before its the accepted practice.

Mathematicians who are already doing formal proofs are discovering it have the same properties as shared computer code. Those properties have have lead to most of the code executed on the planet being open source source, despite the fact you can't make money directly from it.

Code is easy to share, easy to collaborate on, and in the case of formal proofs easy to trust. It is tedious to write, but collaboration is so easy that publishing your 1/2 done work will often prompt others to do some of the tedious stuff. Code isn't self documenting unless it's very well written, but even horrible code is far better at documenting what it does than what you are describing.
If Big Bang advocates can claim the Big Bang created a whole universe of matter in a single instant as if by magic, then we can likewise make the simpler more scientifically justifiable claim that emptiness spawns tiny bits of matter everywhere, all the time.

The fact that CMB lines up with an explosion theory may simply be that Black Holes are mathematically similar to explosions (i.e. starting small, and growing spherically)

Regarding Event Horizon surface, I say there's something like wave-particle duality going on with this observer v.s. observed paradox. The EH is both a 'surface' and 'not-a-surface' depending on your perspective. Physics is odd enough for these kinds of paradoxes, when there's equal evidence for both viewpoints.
I grew up in the country so during HS the only music i knew was either country/western or heavy metal. I didn't hear this album until college, i fell in love with it but my more sophisticated friends didn't think that highly of it. I still listen to The Wall end to end on long trips driving by myself.
Close the lid slowly, while keeping your eyes in a place so you can still see the screen and the keyboard. The screen will turn off before the laptop is completely shut.
Sometimes they are self funding. In the case you listed they are. however there are lots of different inspections and they all have different funding.
I understand that there is probably some sort of fear of murder or untimely death by doctors "throwing up their hands" or pressure from inheritors to "move on"

However the hard line makes no sense. In most places that human euthanasia is illegal no one has any problem killing animals because it is more merciful than allowing them to spend their final time suffering tremendously.
Very innovative but it seems to require a level of precision that I don't think I've achieved on a phone keyboard.
could you provide a link to the code?
I was actually tasked with pulling a customer list out of dBASE 2 on CP/M that had 8" floppy disks (in addition to the hard drive).

I managed to do it by configuring the serial port as the printer, at 9600/n/8/1.

I used a null modem into my laptop, and captured the output with Procomm.

Fun times.
You want to rewrite each commit snapshot in isolation? Like fix the formatting for each?

Sounds like `git test fix` from git-branchless.

https://blog.waleedkhan.name/formatting-a-commit-stack/
> They say people with 2-foreign born parents are overrepresented in the statistics of crime suspects. Does that translate to guilty of crimes? Maybe, but I would place money that racism and discrimination especially in more homogenous societies plays a part.

With that logic, I don't know what sort of statistic could even convince you.

As an aside, one uses prosecution (instead of guilty verdicts) simply because the statistics for prosecution are available.
Cronwell: Rethinking Version Control for Engineering
Encryption using data-specific keys
I have found seasoning doesn't affect the stickiness of the pan. My MIL left my carbon steel pan sitting in water, so I had to grind it to the bone to remove the rust. But even with no seasoning, I was able to cook eggs no problem. The key is temperature control. However, the pan started getting rusty from just sitting out, so I ended up re-seasoning it anyway.
A working link to the book is: https://github.com/barry-jay-personal/tree-calculus/blob/mas... (look for the download button on the right)
Interesting.

CellMapper, at least, is not even a little bit open source. It doesn't even have an API.

This leads me to wonder what other details that FA provides which might have been fabricated from thin air.
Related:

Converting untrusted PDFs into trusted ones: The Qubes Way (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538888 - Nov 2015 (5 comments)
Automaton.

The singular is automaton. Automata is plural.
The two problems are that it makes the lives of students and postdocs torture, and that the experts tend to agree without sufficient scrutiny of the details (and the two problems are intrinsically connected: the surviving students are "trained" to accept those kinds of leaps and proliferate the practice).

I think this practice happens in many specialized fields. The thing with math is that the main problem is the publications become inaccessible. But when you have the same sort of thing in a field where the formulations assumptions that aren't formalizable but merely "plausible" (philosophy or economics, say), you have these assumptions introduced into the discussion invisibly.
A 75% take rate is absolutely disgusting. There’s needs to be more regulation in place for these types of practices.

Another case is Apple that take 30% of all revenue from an app developer including in app purchases. It’s awful
> That was the best part of owning the car

> And the whole part of cooking is experimenting.

Both seem out of touch
Wow it's impressive to see that this page has remained up for so long!

I used to email the owner a long time ago when I was really getting into Pink Floyd in high school. It was one of the first times I can really recall about having long, ongoing conversations online about something I was becoming increasingly passionate about. I really enjoyed the debate and back and forth that they were willing to entertain with me.

Sadly it looks like those conversations have been lost to time/old email addresses. But the idea that people would be open and willing to chat about their hobbies is really what defined the internet to me of that age.
If you only knew how I hate and struggle with the official docs and how your service is a very needed breath of fresh air! Thank you a lot!
> They literally built a styrofoam wall on front of the band as they played until at one point you can’t even see them.

I never had the chance to go to a Pink Floyd concert, but I saw Roger Waters a few years ago and the huge wall was there too, along with a helicopter if I remember well.
interesting app, what makes it different from typingmind? and how many users do you have currently?
This is a very well done launch. We ought to be taking notes.

As for the app itself, it looks more like something niche Ev made in an attempt to enrich his own life than a business poised for growth. There is a place for that. I hope, anyway.
Sounds like you have some commitment issues with picking a distro?

Or are you just trying them all out to let us know? Because you've named a few that are all the same family.

People who are unfamiliar with Linux will look at this list and just ignore it as too complicated. When in reality it's much simpler.
The author's fold example is unfair. They could've just called accumulator.extend() and then return the accumulator inside the fold example for a fair apple to apple comparison. Just mark the accumulator as mut.

Furthermore, I'd use with_capacity in both cases: Vec::with_capacity(list_of_lists.iter().map(|l| l.len()).sum())
Also, there were a ton of very powerful third-party libraries too!
I think this is an unfair characterisation of how Ding played. The issue wasn't lack of ambition, but lack of confidence leading to misevaluation. Judging from the long thinks and how he's played in recent years, it's clear he doesn't fully trust his calculation. But I think he deserves credit for his ambition, actually. If he really wanted to play for draws he wouldn't be playing the French or the English. He'd be aiming for e4 e5 with an early queen trade. He mostly chose interesting openings with a lot of fight in them, often got an advantage, and simply misplayed by underestimating his position. Classic sign of a player with confidence issues.
Longer waiting time also means longer suffering. It is a trade-of to consider.

One week seems a bit short but honestly not like he has that many years left anyway so the best he can hope for is going out on his on terms.

I am super critical on euthanasia for younger people. I think it should only be allowed for cases when it is absolutely medically certain that they will die soon. But 80+, if you lived that long you probably know yourself pretty well at this point and are unlikely to change your mind. Aging, when coupled with mental decline, is horrific. It is good to allow them to go in a humane way.

I had multiple relatives with dementia die and I have always felt a sense of relieve that their suffering had finally ended.
Would you feel the same way if the waiting period were objective? Say a study was performed with varying wait periods, the percentage of people who changed their minds and opted out was tracked, and the final length was set somewhere on this curve to minimize both the delay and the number of people who may have changed their minds. There are ethical problems with that precise setup, but you get the idea.

The human psyche is a frail and changeable thing-a pause in a long-held mental routine can lead to greater consideration at any age, not just for the young.
the monetization hopes are mentioned in the FAQ on the website: https://www.mozi.app/faqs
(tldr: freemium)

ev also does mention in the NYTimes article, for those that have NYT subs

"They shared stories about reconnecting with old friends via the app — moments that seemed valuable enough that customers might pay for it, he said. Mozi is free, but plans to charge for premium features it develops."

(disclosure: i work on the mozi app)
How common is this, really? I think you would have to weigh the chances of someone going through multiple specialists (psych evaluation, obgyn, possible other referrals) over the course of months and then magically they come to regret the procedure well into their full adulthood? At that point you might as well say that people shouldn’t be allowed cosmetic surgery, lasik, or braces.
Final Cut could really be considered Waters' first solo album. One that the other members contributed to, so to speak.
My physics teacher played the whole album in high school class as we were doing our work. The door to the classroom was open and the music was echoing through the whole floor. I was surprised none of the teachers next door said anything.
No accounting for taste.

My favorite part of owning a car is when the automatic transmission shifts for me, and when the ABS pumps the brakes for me.
These families had armed men going to their homes screaming threats at them for being "paid actors" after having already lost their children. This was well documented and proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
It sums up proprietary software.

FOSS software does not have these misfeatures.
> mistakes are often or sometimes made

I think the mistakes in question would primarily be around whether someone is of sound mind to consent.
I’m sorry for your loss. Her story brings me a lot of comfort, thanks for sharing it.
Very cool stuff thanks for the commentary and good luck!
100% you articulated exactly what I couldn't - thank you. It feels very wrong to be considering this in the UK when we are on the decline. Espcially since the current government have demonstrated that they don't really care about pensioners.