jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This sort of thing is really fascinating. I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow recently, and at the same I've been trying to make a difficult decision between two job offers.

I have been astounded to discover how irrational my thought processes are, even though this is an important choice and I'm consciously trying to avoid instinctive and emotional decisions: I see evidence of halo effects, risk aversion, substituting difficult comparisons for easier ones ("what's the better work environment?" is hard, but "where did I have conversations I liked better?" is easy), and more.

Overall I wouldn't actually recommend trying to learn about cognitive biases in the midst of making an important decision – it's really, really easy to tie yourself up in knots! E.g. "Do I like them better because I interviewed with them more recently (availability heuristic)? Am I making the mistake of preferring the easy certainty of having made up my mind over the discomfort of making a complex choice?"

It's a really cool field of research, though.

Edit: One interesting "hack" the book mentions is how to game feedback. Essentially, we decide how frequent something is by how easily we can call to mind examples of it. However, past about six items, most people will have trouble coming up with examples of anything; however, unless they're aware of this fact, the difficulty of coming up with the later examples can cause them to erroneously think it's not very frequent after all.

So, for example, if a professor in a course evaluation requires students to list 12 ways to improve the course, students will actually rate the course more highly than if they are only asked for three! Evil uses for this are left to the reader's imagination.
A related effect, of course, is that it becomes practically impossible for politicians to plan for any sort of career, or parties to make personnel plans with more than a single-parliament horizon. Even a candidate with a hefty 60% support can expect only a single term at more than even odds.

Not only would this rob the legislature of experience, it would also mean politicians towards the end of each term would be focused on securing their next job, rather than performing their current one.
Hm, on inspection I am off by about a factor of 10, but if I had a faster net connection, I could hit that without too much trouble. I've got the usual Ubuntu ISO's and some more experimental OS's like "Elementary OS". I use uTorrent, which has mini-apps available. Most of the apps are just channels for content, so I've got Make Magazine channel, which only has old videos by now; TED talks, which are always popular; Pioneer One, which is an indie made-for-the-web TV show I like; and Khan Academy videos which use a lot of bandwidth because they've packaged an entire unit per torrent. In addition I'm downloading the Geocities torrent [1], and I got a bunch of video presentations from the Chaos Communications Congress back in December which are still in demand [2]. Since I last rebooted, the most popular torrents I have are videos from The Next HOPE conference, and BackTrack 4.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840481 and http://www.archiveteam.org/archives/geocitiespatch/

[2] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events.en.html and ftp://media.ccc.de/congress/2010/mp4-h264-HQ/
Should hr be blamed for hiring mediocre programmers?
I couldn't tell from the Locale web site whether it lets you turn photo geocoding on/off based on location. My photo sharing site has this ability server-side, but I've always thought it would be better built into the phone.
I found the comment scores a good motivation for thinking about what I'm typing before hitting that 'add comment' button. Good imperative to participate instead of troll.

The opposite is true for others, I'm sure.
Adding +1, since you can't tell if the parent comment has been upvoted.

EDIT: this -> parent comment
I have a feeling my solution might take care of that too. I'll shoot you an email when I write it up sometime today
The ideas they believe they are opposing are genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, “women are property” levels of misogyny, and “they want our kids” levels of homophobia and transphobia.

How correct they are about what they’re fighting is a separate question. As you have demonstrated, there are many different definitions of fascism. The Berlin Wall was described as the “anti-fascism protection wall” by the DDR. And, of course, “my opponent is literally Hitler” is widely dismissed as a melodramatic overstatement.

However, if we presuppose that they are correct about who they are targeting — sadly plausible, given how many genocides followed the one in WW2 — then to say that Antifa as a movement is itself “fascist” is like saying that the Allied powers in WW2 were “fascist” for violently opposing the “political opinion” of Herr Adolf H. and Signore Benito M.
In some cases it seems like pure conspicuous consumption. The sheer impracticality of it is a badge of honor. This is not atypical for American consumerism.

In fact, I wonder about the Tesla truck's appeal. I feel like the oversized truck's negative ecological impact is one part of its appeal, do does an electric truck actually end up selling? Here in the South, some pickup drivers modify their exhausts to spew toxic smoke ("rolling coal") which is clearly not an option with the Tesla...
Instead, developers will need to take ownership of their work, end to end. If it goes wrong, it should be on them to fix it, nobody else.

It might not be the intention, but this article reads as if the author thinks of developers as isolated units who should work on their own. Points like the one I've quoted are OK on a team, or even company, level, but they're horrible to do on an individual level. The important things in software are the product and the user; delaying something because an individual developer is taking a long time is plain wrong. Everyone on the team should be willing to step up and support when the product needs it.

In a team it should be the case that everyone can help out testing and fixing everyone else's code. That limits the silo'ing of knowledge about the codebase, it means code gets 'many eyes' to spot problems, and juniors learn from the seniors more quickly.
Poly count is low so our roads won't lag.
Can pre-order it from the UK, so there is at least intention of it ending up here. Also, I love it!
My entire point is: what determines that it's necessity?

None of the updates included fixes to critical bugs or security flaws AFAIK; they were incremental improvements in stability.

Who is determining that patch 1 needs to go out rather than being rolled into patch 2? On what basis?
Just to be clear, I meant "go to" (and edited the post accordingly).
Is it weird that the visuals are the part that has me most excited about this site?

This would be awesome on chromecast.
Worked with an offshore team in India, can confirm this. Very irritating.
Sounds like a win for the good guys.
I did the same for mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COIVkkHxNR0 (this isn't the bang video, but she knows the commands for "what do you want?" "point" "go home", etc).

I also taught her verbs and nouns, and could say "point ball" and she would point to her ball, or "fetch ball" and she would fetch it. Same with "bone", "rope" and a few more toys.
Magic + DoorDash seems like a great pairing. DoorDash wants to get away from just food pickup, Magic needs better delivery options. (When I tried Magic, they priced out delivery via a cab.)
It isn't the idea of a timing attack I take issue with. I can understand how that could be possible.

I don't understand why purposefully having everything related to cryptography taking a predetermined time doesn't solve it. That's where my skepticism occurs.

I've had people mention OS page faults, ping requests, and DDOS concerns and I don't buy any of it. if the timing is really so tight that a page fault can throw you off, there's no way an outside attacker could possibly glean anything useful from the timing. The timings by definition have to be varying more than that.

I don't buy the DDOS because cryptographic functions are designed to be slow, we're not trying to make them slower, we're trying to make them even between requests. Choose a reasonable delta and anything that blows that delta starts over with another delta instead of just returning.

I don't understand why that wouldn't solve the problem reasonably. At this point I feel like it's an academic exercise rather than a practical one.

I'll openly admit a lot of these points become moot if the attacker has access to the machine itself where something like latency cannot dwarf the timings of the functions themselves (when they're specifically made to wait for a delta).
Do you know what double refractive is? How can it be "generally inferior" and also have more sparkle?
No support for Android (yet?)
Hah. They have enemies. Find them and explain.

If you're talking about Bill Gates, sell to Larry Ellison "Here's how I'm going to put a thumb in his eye." Or at a more accessible level, tell the same thing to Calcanis as regards Arrington.
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js has 900+ followers on github, by far the biggest project from my initial analysis.
Storage + bandwidth + hosting + assorted costs (maintenance, backups, email, etc.), all for a year + profit
The counter to that argument is "You already have to deal with enough visual noise while you're programming, why add more?". Semi-colon insertion rules aren't that complicated. To me, it's a matter of what style project participants are comfortable with.
I think this is the most important point: if understanding when or when not to use semicolons requires a subtle understanding of the language grammar, then terminating every statement has a cognitive cost. This cost adds to coding friction.

I don't personally use JS, but I do use C/C++ and Python. I prefer Python's syntax because I find it clean. Most of my work is in semicolon-and-brace languages, so I'm clearly familiar with that style, too. But were I to code in JS, I'd always use semicolons, because that's easier than constantly asking myself, "Do I need a semicolon or not?"

As an analogy, I use my turn signal every time I make a turn in my car. Every time. Even if I'm in an empty parking lot. That way, I never have to decide, "Should I use my turn signal?" It's just automatic. It reduces the amount of thought I have to put into things that don't actually matter.
Why do you think you need safari or a browser? There are plenty of other (and easier) ways to make HTTP connections in iOS and implement account registration.
> That's really tough, my wife would probably leave me and we'd have to move out of our nice, safe neighborhood.

Nobody said being excellent was easy. This also doesn't mean that your choice or his is better.
I've been doing some tests with sprite.js. For what I want to do, it seems a bit sluggish and has some bugs. You can switch between DOM and Canvas mode, which is neat, but there are some bugs in the canvas mode that cause my sprites to disappear, and sprites with a repeating texture seem to show a seam. Impact looks quite a bit more polished.
It has global state. In erlang processes are long lived and you bring functions to them to do stuff. Suddenly you will do something and a piece of state that you weren't expecting will be in your process dictionary...

Some erlang processes run for literally years - and exist over multiple releases of the software. Reasoning about how something did or did not get into the process dictionary is for the birds.
Location: Europe
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Java (SE, Spring, Swing, FX), JavaScript (Node, React, Vue), Python, REST, GraphQL, SQL, NoSQL, ETL, AWS, GCP, Docker, Git, etc.
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgetanev/
Email: georgejazzt[at]gmail[dot]com

- Multifaceted software engineer and solutions architect.

- Author of the first linear time binary tree roll algorithm.

- Research published by IEEE, OEIS, and Springer.

- 12 years of experience in the tech industry.

- Excited about customer-facing products.
Could you describe your latency requirements and roughly what a build looks like? It's hard to offer advice without more information.

Is NFS unacceptable for the build phase or for runtime phase?
1. Author writes and posts article on HN.

2. Commenters criticize article.

3. Author responds to criticism with " why didn't you write this yourself" over and over.

Wow..
Even if the conclusion may be true, I find the argument unconvincing. There exist large differences in intelligence between some species, so it's plausible to think the same could be true within a species.
Is the 85MB test file available? I wasn't able to find it. I'd like to test this result against nerve [0], a brainfuck to x86_64 asm compiler I wrote (like funkicrab, it is also written in Rust).

[0]: https://github.com/JoshMcguigan/nerve
You realize Google has a official program that will surface paywalled news sites in search results, knowing the user will not be able to see the linked results?

https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/programs/
Hah, that's a cool hack. It reminds me of the folks who were editing pirated Mythbusters videos so each myth was its own continuous segment, without the recaps ("before the break, we were watching...") and.. precaps? ("Stay tuned to see what happens!")
> Amazon Prime did something similar but by bundling Video and Music but I was already paying for Prime just for the free shipping so it was just extra.

This is an interesting statement. Users are paying for Amazon Prime Video and Music one way or the other. I'd happily pay $79.00 instead of the current $120.00 a year for Amazon Prime without the Video and Music.
> Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly

They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.
I'm not even sure there is a fixed exchange rate, but if there is, I think it's >> 1 release per paper[0].

I can definitely imagine writing a paper for the first major release. If the software solves an pressing scientific problem (e.g., replacing laborious experiments with accurate simulations) or shows off a new algorithm, the paper itself might be a big deal.

Subsequent versions seem trickier. You could certainly publish big technical advances, like a parallel version of the core algorithm. I'm not sure what you do for more routine maintenance and incremental improvements (e.g., bug fixes, more import/export formats, better UI). There are specialized journals that might take these "reports", like the Journal of Open Source Software, but I'm not sure if a CV of JOSS papers would give you a viable career.

[0] If I had to guess, I'd bet there were multiple PhDs in the topic you were working on. While the code base would be a good start, there's a lot more to a research degree than organizing and documenting some code.
You touched the core of the discussion, imo, that is there are two schools of thaught involved.

One sees the universe and anything else as a machine -> determinism

The others are seeing the universe as a discrete continuum -> indeterminism

That is also my fundamental criticism at the current approach, it is not even considering the possibility that the whole approach could be wrong.

I think intelligent machines are possible, but not without much more fundamental understanding. Hyping, cheering deep learning and all this stuff, is just irrational and illogical.
The purpose of an all-hands meeting is to disseminate clear information to employees. In this case, Yahoo has done a very mediocre job in making the message clear. They could have told their own employees the clear truth about the future of delicious, but instead they couched it in FUD terms like "sunset".

So one employee in particular didn't arrive at the same conclusion about this leaked slide as the Yahoo PR department intended to convey, and leaked the slide to someone outside of Yahoo. That person also came away with a similar interpretation.

This does still point to one of the key mistakes Yahoo makes - it's inability to communicate clearly with it's own employees. And by masking these communication in PR-speak rather than plain clear English either suggest complete incompetance in communication, or a still unclear roadmap for Yahoo in general.

It was fair to assume "sunset" meant close down. Why would an employee of Yahoo leak a slide if it was clear that delicious would merely be sold, not closed down?

"sunset" in this context is a particularly poor choice of word. It has too many connotations of things going down. They could have said instead they intent to sell delicious - their employees do deserve clear and decisive leadership.

This is very much a leadership failure at Yahoo. They have failed to communicate effectively with the Sunnyvale staff who are still reeling after seeing their colleagues laid off.

Unfortunately, speaking as an ex-Yahoo, this is not new, nor surprising.
> But now, the researchers have discovered that the “quantum nature” of the molecule's internal motion actually does affect the molecule as a whole as it moves across the surface, defying the ‘classical’ laws that it’s simply too big to feel quantum effects."

Well, first, Heisenberg's uncertainly principle doesn't place an upper bound on the size of a mass susceptible to quantum effects, only the probability. An easy way to picture this is to say that flipping a fair coin once has equal probability to come up heads (1) or tails (0). But for a single flip, 1/2 is not a possible outcome.

For a million coin flips, an averaged result of 1 or 0 is still a possibility, but it is extremely unlikely, whereas an averaged outcome of 1/2, which was impossible for a single coin flip, is now rather likely. This means there is no mass or size threshold for quantum effects, as many people think -- the effects just become less apparent.

But it's important to distinguish between quantum effects and energy state. If a system's wave function collapses and a superposition of states becomes one state, that state cannot have more or less energy than any other possible state. Expressed another way, if you open Schrödinger's box and the cat is dead, the dead cat can't have more or less energy than the living cat.

The bottom line is that quantum theories don't violate energy conservation, and all the talk about ZPE leading to spacecraft drives arises from people who don't understand physics.

> "... defying the ‘classical’ laws that it’s simply too big to feel quantum effects."

This is a case of a journalist who also doesn't understand quantum theory. No classical laws are being defied, and there is no mass so big that it cannot experience quantum effects. The reason is easy to explain -- a huge mass is composed of individual atoms, and individual atoms experience quantum effects. Q.E.D. :)
Problem was already solved: "In modern times, the vast majority of UNIX systems have evolved, and now the kernel ensures (more or less) only one process/thread is woken up on a connection event."
I thought this was a great read, clearly the author has thought through is argument and does a good job of describing his reasoning about the challenges the tech community faces with regard to Hollywood's livelyhood.

The only weakness for me was that it is hard to argue from a point too far removed from the sources of your arguments. Specifically if you are arguing the future of "entertainment" then Hollywood is but a piece, similarly if you argue too closely to the source such as the future of "movies" then technology is but a piece. So finding a place in the spectrum where one point of view and dominate another isn't a very solid way of making your point. :-)

That said, it made me wonder if computer games will go through the 'star' system (clearly some of that has happened with titles like "Sid Meir's Civilization") or if it will be different for programs. At the 'top' (or most diffuse?) point of the spectrum you can take examples from music, books, games, movies, and television as ways people tease dollars from consumers. And following that line of reasoning lead me to thinking about the fundamental question, is it money or is it art?

There are two parallel universes in most entertainment systems, the one that is designed to extract the most money (consumer focused) and the one that is designed to express the artists intent most faithfully (artist focused). The latter occasionally makes a lot of money, the former occasionally makes very little money. The "space" is a blend of the two.

Many of the developers I know are "artists' where they have very strong feelings about how their programs should work, and I believe we see a lot of that here on HN. But I also know engineers who are focused more on the "business" where they write code that makes them the most money, period. And they are often harshly judged in fora such as this one.

So where does that leave us? I think it makes it important to fix the context before we debate, as that affects the persuasiveness of the different points of view. It also suggests that Paul's call to action could be interpreted more literally to be "Work on the 'consumer focused' side of tech for entertainment harder."

If you think of Entertainment as a giant pie of dollars, getting more of those dollars can be achieved either by being better than other players in your wedge, or by increasing the size of your wedge relative to the other players. Looked at in that context, it isn't about "beating" Hollywood so much as making Hollywood less relevant.
What's wrong with that word. Women I know use it all the time. They don't mind being the subject of a transitive verb instead of the actor. One conquers them because they have huge ... tracts of land.
Some of these answers are outright dangerous in my opinion. This list is quite a mixed bag.
I suspect this kind of automation will end up reducing the total number of trucks required, perhaps by quite a lot.
I have a feeling he is used to his staff accidentally shattering extremely expensive things at critical moments on camera by now.
If normal people want to hear my message, and there's only one platform they can effectively locate it through, then I'd say you are required to provide services to me. At this point, it's like cutting off somebody's internet or phone service for their political views - the argument that Verizon isn't the government and is just "muh showing you the door" wears thin.

There seems to be this underlying assumption that nationalism, paleoconservatism and various commonly-held views that are wrongly called "fascism" are actually things people want to hear, and if we allow them the same access to services as any other views, their popularity will overturn this entire neoliberal scheme that's being artificially propped up by organizations like the ADL rooting out free speech in every area they can legally do so. I sort of agree - this entire project would fail without censorship.

And, if as Baron Cohen implies, we're really just a bunch of stupid hateful beasts always primed to commit another Holocaust as soon as the boot is off our neck, well...then we've got deeper problems in our society than a lack of social media censorship.