skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We are a democracy, but 144 million Americans – 42% of the adults who live here – do not vote and have no say in what happens.

Why do we worry so much about voter turnout? A 58% voter turnout is a statistically significant sampling of the population; aren't we getting a pretty accurate measurement of the actual vote with that high of voter turnout?

Now if voter turnout is skewed, then that's a problem worth talking about. But with how much time and effort it takes to vote, it seems like such a waste of time with how we do it today.

We could get the same results with much less effort if we made it work like jury duty; at each election we select 10% of the population at random and it's their job to actually do the research and go to the work of voting (research candidates, wait 3 hours at the ballot box, etc), and the remaining 90% of us get to go watch a movie or something that day.
I have a flexible commute that sometimes involves driving a car into the zone and if I see snow in the forecast I'll be less likely to be in the city with a car that day.

I love congestion pricing, I will gladly pay $9 if it lowers traffic during peak hours. I also try to plan trips in the offpeak hours anyway. If you leave at 11pm you can get from shea stadium to Philly in an hour forty-five.
> Burdens of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages in 184 countries

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4.pdf

The data and the code used for the analysis appears to be available.

----

One of the reasons that we don't have Universal Healthcare in the US is that things that are categorically unhealthy would be prohibited from being sold. Afterall, it would benefit not only the receivers of care but also the people funding the healthcare system. The sellers of those things will fight (to their death) to prevent that environment from existing.

Not allowing something to be mass produced, marketed and sold is different than banning it outright.

I personally think mass scale tobacco and soda should not be sold, at the same time I think people can hand roll and pack a pipe into the grave. Same for their at home bathtub soda.
How do you avoid judging actual human discussions subjectively? I remember being a forum moderator and struggling with exactly the same issues. No matter what guidelines we'd set, there'd be essentially legitimate discussions that were way over the line superficially, and on the other you'd have neo-nazis acting in ways that weren't technically bad, but were clearly leading there.

Facebook moderators have an even harder job than that because the inherent scale of the platform prevents the kinds of personal insights and contextual understanding I had.
i like the opa2134 pa , or in general the bur brown opa, on the expensive site and on the cheap one the ne5534.
I mean thats a pretty big stretch. You can certainly make the argument but I believe they call it casting a wide net.
> Well, I'm competent at HTML and CSS yet I never properly read the HTML or CSS specs either.

I would strongly recommend you do! Most web developers are unaware of a good deal of just what all is available to them in those specs (especially HTML).
My flagged post above:

Entire states worth of illegal aliens entered the country during this administration. Housing supply and demand has pushed lower income US citizens to the streets: https://homeland.house.gov/2024/10/24/startling-stats-factsh...
He was a mainstream Hollywood director, working with the biggest stars of the day, and co-founded the studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. The film was some controversial, but much less than you would hope. Most of the controversy is retrospective.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/02/05/arts/05FRIDAYFILE...
There's some very early coverage on Digital Foundry where they got to look at the 5080 and Cyberpunk.

https://youtu.be/xpzufsxtZpA
I'm not sure the fact that his film glorifying the Ku Kux Klan was watched by a president also noted for being racist even by the standards of his time (who later condemned the film and claimed to have been unaware of its contents) somehow innoculates it against charges of racism
First, it's not exclusively defined by revenue (which is what my first point was alluding to). Second, the underlying assumption of revenue generated is that it's going to the MTA and used to improve public transit and therefore quality of life in the city, which would be a success.
Its more naive to think a fact-checking unit susceptible to govt pressure is likely to be better.
There will always be govt pressure in one form or another to censor content they doesnt like. And we've obviously seen how this works with the Dems for the last 4 years.
>> The IBM Roadrunner was the first supercomputer to reach one petaflop (1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, or FLOPS) on May 25, 2008.

$100M, 2.35MW, 6000 ft^2

>>Designed for AI researchers, data scientists, and students, Project Digits packs Nvidia’s new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which delivers up to a petaflop of computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning, and running AI models.

$3000, 1kW, 0.5 ft^2
> However, before making policy decisions, I would want the second order data:

I think this the wrong lens. The correct lens is: if they don't voluntarily make this change, will they be forced to?

The incoming administration seems committed to banning "censorship", so I believe making a cost/benefit analysis is something of a false choice.

E.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJfUXVOoFBo
>then today we have all made an infinite number of choices

The way I like to think about it is that once a choice has risen to the level of conscious awareness, it is an illusion that a person can just decline to choose.
OK, the only modern example on your list is TARP. I think the strength of your examples does not justify the strength of your statement.

Actually, I just read your update, you've changed from making a bold (and, in my view, wrong) statement about how government is not responsive to the will of the people, to a fairly boring technical point about how a representative democracy works. I have no idea if you're just doing a motte and bailey or if you were never trying to make a bold claim in the first place...

I'll just leave my piece here, in any case: I believe that the US system of government actually works really well, and in general we tend to get laws and regulations that are based on the broad consensus of a very diverse electorate. This is a good thing. In my opinion, when most people complain about how the government doesn't work for the people, what they actually don't like is that a lot of the country disagrees with them, and that disagreement is reflected in our government.

But, maybe I'm wrong and there's some other system we can come up with that will keep a vast and diverse nation hanging together prosperously for another 250 years. Shrug.
IQ measures reasoning capability, not speed of mental calculations.
This years founders edition is what I really want from a GPU. Stop wasting my 2nd PCIe slot because you've made it 3.5/4 slots BIG!
It is insane that they are now cooling 575W with two slots in height.
This quote is likely intended for people who've tried other solutions and disliked them, but as someone who's never used a game engine of any kind, I'd appreciate someone giving me an ELI5 of how "nodes" relate to "pretending that collections of things are things."

Is the problem here that using a nodal editor encourages/incentivizes you through its UX, to assign properties and relationships to e.g. a `Vector` of `Finger`s — but then you can't actually write code that makes the `Vector<Finger>` do anything, because it is just a "collection of things" in the end, not its own "type of thing" that can have its own behavior?

And does "everything is an Entity, just write code" mean that there's no UX layer that encourages `Vector<Finger>` over just creating a Hand class that can hold your Fingers and give the hand itself its own state/behavior?

Or, alternately, does that mean that rather than instantiating "nodes" that represent "instances of a thing that are themselves still types to be further instantiated, but that are pre-wired to have specific values for static members, and specific types or objects [implicitly actually factories] for relationship members" (which is... type currying, kind of?), you instead are expected to just subclass your Entity subclass to further refine it?
Any examples of cities that have done a good job on this?
The other consideration: your company's code probably just isn't that good.

I think many people over-value this giant pile of text. That's not to say IP theft doesn't exist, but I think the actual risk is often overblown. Most of an organization's value is in the team's collective knowledge and teamwork ability, not in the source code.
How are they suppose to do that without coming across shady?
Shetty Images
Thanks for the clarification, if you have any pointers to learn more about this I'd be interested to check it out.
I don't know about PHP, what amount of magic goes in behind Python's dunder methods? You can open it and see
> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.

This is just overtly and flatly wrong. I reject your experience fully because over the past few decades the internet has become more open, not less. We openly debated people that believed vaccines caused autism and gave them microphones. Every single loud asshole and dipshit was given maximum volume on whatever radio show or podcast or social media platform they could want.
Sure! Because, of course, the poor shouldn't rise from misery and try to break the chains of ignorance - they must remain poor, ignorant and filthy always garner the sympathy of the third-worldist left, even when the third world is in their own backyard. The poor are beautiful because they are poor!
Well the US invaded Greenland when Germany invaded Denmark in WWII and have had a military presence ever since.

The US also engineered Panama's independence in order to get sovereignty over the canal zone, which they completed. And then of course they actually invaded the country in 1989.
So, I might have my terminology wrong, but here's what I mean:

I currently have a 27" 4K monitor connected to my Mac.

It's 4K, so my actual resolution is 3840x2160.

However, in my System Settings, I have my effective resolution set to 2560x1440.

macOS automatically scales the interface to make text and elements more readable. A 4K monitor (3840x2160) scaled to 150% would appear as 2560x1440 with a dot pitch of about 163.18 PPI, resulting in a pretty sharp image. PPI is "pixels-per-inch" AKA "pixel density". The higher the PPI, the sharper the image.

If I had a 1440p monitor set to 1440p resolution, my PPI would be about 108 PPI, which is much less sharp than 163 PPI.

Caveat: All the stuff I said before about non-integer scaling.

This is handy tool to explore PPI and monitor sizes: https://www.sven.de/dpi/
It should be cheaper. No circling the block looking for parking, no space needed at all for that matter. That alone is worth giving taxis/ubers at least a different pricing structure.
If the Nvidia system runs reasonably well with stock distribution kernels, it may well be worth the extra price. Usually, an optimized, custom kernel is a warning sign, but maybe they have upstreaming plans, and support for other distributions is planned.
Despicable. They even intentionally scroll the page down a bit to hide the Bing logo at the top.
Yeah, I agree it's a win for Meta from a $$ perspective, just not for the reason the OP expressed (which was what I was disagreeing with). \
Capture of an ancient Charon around Pluto
> You can debate why turnout is so low in this country for something so high stakes.

Maybe because statistically speaking your individual vote does not in fact matter? And that's a principle that applies equally to the left/right. For every marginal non-voter in your preferred party you get to vote, there's a marginal non-voter in the opposite party that somebody else is trying to get out to vote.

Put another way, we could intentionally reduce the sample size and mandate that only 33% of adults vote in any given election, and we'd reduce the statistical confidence in the election result very little.

Any given individual's singular vote (which is likely nullified by the marginal person in the opposite party) just has so little impact compared to Atwood's $8m political contribution that it's a rounding error.
How I use the notes field in my password manager
Do you realize this study uses completely subjective post-hoc assessment of what industry lobby's wanted?
Yeah, a 2-ply engine is pretty terrible at chess. Especially with no quiescence search.

I know what you're describing well, I've dabbled quite a bit in chess engine dev myself, and I'm planning to get back into it soon; I've got some interesting new ideas recently I wanna try out(once they're fleshed out enough to actually be implemented, right now they're just fanciful ideas I'm kicking around my head).

Testing is a bitch though, for sure. I know that stockfish is constantly being playtasted against itself, with a new instance spawned for every pull request etc, and then given an elo rating. That way they can tell if a potential change makes it weaker or stronger.

Debugging isn't easy either. Forget about stepping over code in the debugger. You have no idea whether the bug is only triggered after billions of nodes. That's a lot of stack frames to step through. And forget about debug prints too, for the most part, because putting an unconditional debug print in your search() , qsearch() or eval() will quickly lead to gigabytes and gigabytes of output...

Only helpful thing I found was to use asserts. Find invariants, and in your debug version check them every node, die if they don't hold and barf out your stack frame or a core dump. If you're lucky the bug is somewhere near where the assert failed in the call tree. Even that isn't guaranteed though.
Performance per watt[1] makes more sense than raw power for most consumer computation tasks today. Would really like to see more focus on energy efficiency going forward.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
Community Notes is the best thing about Musk's Dumpster fire.

The problem with CN right now, though, is that Musk appears to block it on most of his posts, and/or right-wing moderators downvote the notes so they don't appear or disappear.
Just to avoid confusion, there is no such thing as a "PD certified" usb-c cable. All usb-c cables, by any version of the standard, have to safely support at least 3 amps at 20V. And for 5 amps they have to contain an active marker chip that's involved in the PD negotiation.

Any cable not fulfilling these requirements isn't allowed to called a usb-c cable, though I'm sure certain foreign manufacturers don't care.
US sanctions Chinese service provider for supporting threat group
You should look into the implementation, at least the one that X has published. It's not just users shouting back and forth at each other. It's actually a pretty impressive system
Nobody thinks Hitler’s art is museum-quality or art historically important in the same way that Griffith’s and Riefenstahl’s movies are.

And even if Hitler’s paintings really had been particularly good, I still don’t think museums in Germany and elsewhere would exhibit them. Enough people feel that would be highly disrespectful of the victims of the Holocaust (probably most museum curators would think that). You can of course believe this kind of red line shouldn’t exist in society, but it’s there.
Michele Sindona
I have a complicated history with this viewpoint. I remember back when Wikipedia was launched in 2001, I thought- there is no way this will work... it will just end up as a cesspool. Boy was I wrong. I think I was wrong because Wikipedia has a very well defined and enforced moderation model, for example: a focus on no original research and neutral point of view.

How can this be replicated with topics that are by definition controversial, and happening in real time? I don't know. But I don't think Meta/X have any sort of vested interest in seeing sober, fact-based conversations. In fact, their incentives work entirely in the opposite direction: the more anger/divisive the content drives additional traffic and engagement [1]. Whereas, with Wikipedia, I would argue the opposite is true: Wikipedia would never have gained the dominance it has if it was full of emotionally-charged content with dubious/no sourcing.

So I guess my conclusion from this is that I doubt any community-sourced "fact checking" efforts in-sourced from the social media platforms themselves will be successful, because the incentives are misaligned for the platform. Why invest any effort into something that will drive down engagement on your platform?

[1] Just one reference I found: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2024292118. From the abstract:

> ... we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. ...
Things were going pretty well until I got to this statement:

If your child is born this year, they are likely going to live through +1.5°C of warming by the time they are 25. A fact that is likely going to cause a 40% to 50% drop in the global food supply and a reduction of 2.5 billion — 4 billion in the global population by 2050, at a minimum.

Saying the population is likely to decrease by 30% to 50% by 2050 seems a bit alarmist to me. At least without providing some context on where those numbers are coming from.

This is the problem I see with these reports. The climate scientists are doing a great job forecasting the global climate changes, but they're not necessarily the people who should be assessing impacts. Making alarmist claims without any substantiating evidence, which is mostly outside of their field of expertise, is causing many to reject the claims and evidence that is within their domain of expertise. This isn't helping.

Just stick with the climate facts. Let other experts weigh-in on the climate impacts.
Is it less concerning if Facebook only worked with one side of politics?
How is reducing censorship a bad thing?
Anthropic raising funding valuing it at $60B
Submitted link is to the article's discussion thread. Article link is https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lenovo-Legion-Go-SteamOS

And original Lenovo press link is https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-legi...
> In the case of a TLC driver you'll have them paying probably well over $100 a day (assuming the $2.75 charge x 4-5 trips an hour give or take) and aiding in the transport of probably dozens of people to their destination.

This is completely wrong.

First, the fee for cabs is different from the fee for private cars, and in fact, it was set at the value which is the private car fee divided by the average number of trips into the Congestion Relief Zone that cabs make each day.

Second, passengers are the ones paying the fee, not cab drivers. It's one of the fees tacked on to your receipt.

Third, this fee has already been charged on cab fares since 2019. The only difference is it's now being applied to all vehicles except taxis/FHVs. For cab drivers, there's no difference - it was the one part of the program that has already been in effect for years!
I'm certain it will make parts of the user experience worse, but at least for the Threads app, this seems at least a little necessary - if you're aiming to be the "new" twitter or whatever social need twitter was fulfilling, you need to break free of the shackles of IG/Meta moderation, which is very unforgiving and brutal in very subtle ways that aren't always easy to figure out. But basically, I find a platform like Threads/Twitter are probably unusable for a lot of people unless you can say "hey, you're an asshole" every now and then without Meta slapping you on the wrist or suppressing your content.

One of the only visible actions Meta has taken on my account was once when a cousin commented on a musical opinion I had posted to facebook, I jokingly replied "I'll fight you" and I caught an instant 2 week posting ban and a flag on my account for "violence." Couldn't even really appeal it, or the hoops were so ridiculous that I didn't try. The hilarious thing is these bans will still let you consume the sites' content (gotta get those clicks), you just are unable to interact with it. This kind of moderation is pointless as users will always get around it anyway - leading to stuff like "unalive" to replace killing/suicide references, or "acoustic" to refer to an autistic person, etc. Just silliness, as you'll always be able to find a way to creatively convey your point such that auto-moderators don't catch it.
> I work with designers/developers all the time that don't know how to follow the WCAG recommendations even when you point them to documents and tutorials.

> It's like nobody wants to admit it's difficult, and that's not even getting into screen readers still having many inconsistencies for basic UI patterns.

Accessibility IS hard.

It feels sometimes like nearly everyone involved thinks they'll just read a few good blog posts and know how to make sites accessible. Then the struggle is due to not having read good enough blog posts.

Everyone wants a quick "fix" to a lack of education. Nothing replaces familiarizing one's self with primary source specifications, and most crucially, spending significant time trying out real screen readers.
IIRC that was with MacOS 8, which was in 1997.
Blame the interns!
when ebay was "invented", i remember reading articles talking about how amazing it was that it actually worked, total strangers would send each other goods and money across the internet.

the incredulity was that everybody imagined that there would be more scammers out there than honest people, but there weren't.

but what is ebay supposed to do about people who claim they sent things vs people who claim they didn't receive things?
Ask HN: Is a future Techno-oligarchy inevitable?
Considering that the gap between the super-rich and the rest keeps growing at a vertiginous speed every year[1][2], and that 7 of the top 10 world's wealthies persons come from the tech industry[3] (which we can probably all agree are very powerful and very political), my questions are:

i) Will this trend just keep increasing forever?

ii) How will a future society highly controlled by a few trillionaire tech moguls look like?

---

[1]: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/wealth-five-richest-men-doubles-2020-five-billion-people-made-poorer-decade-division

[2]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/12/global-income-inequality-gap-report-rich-poor/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires
I had to turn autocomplete off. I value it when I want it, but otherwise it's such a distraction that it both slows me down, and actively irritates me.

Perhaps I'm just an old man telling the LLM to get off my lawn, but I find it does bad things to my ability to concentrate on hard things.

Having a good sense of when it would be useful, and invoking it on demand seems to be a decent enough middle ground for me. Much of it boils down to UX - if it could be present but not actively distracting, I'd probably be ok with it.