skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bosch, a German company that serves the auto manufacturers, seems to have bought patents on a battery technology that could be a breakthrough. Remember that 'the German way' of doing business is not to make noise at all. There have been entire German companies operating without marketing and sales departments, and there still are.

I live in Germany.
Create a cryptocurrency and premine it significantly, then launch it?
I used to own a Saab, and a lot of the time they could cram in generic parts instead of needing special saab parts. Why get a hideously expensive Saab radiator when the mechanic can pull a generic radiator off the shelf and be installing it right way?

I don't see that working quite as well with a Tesla.
http://lastpass.com with google authenticator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Authenticator).
The skill of going from potentially "wrong" requirements from non-experts into something engineers can deliver is one of the most important skills I've seen in technical sales people.

Customers have a problem to solve, and try to ask for something to solve that problem. Understanding the problem and proposing a solution (and a price) is how you get happy customers.

https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg is a great example of how to fail at this. The "expert" totally fails to understand the customers needs, and instead gets hung up on bad definitions. He's supposed to be the expert in drawing lines, so he should be able to understand why they need them. You could say the customer is lying about their requirements, but they probably just don't understand them.

This goes for any customer/provider relationship - internal services, it departments, platform enginners. Not just selling stuff to other companies.
Binary advice is rarely useful, you should never rewrite, you should have 100% test coverage, you should only hire graduates and on and on.
> There have been entire German companies operating without marketing and sales departments

Very interesting! Are there any case studies on that?
True, but for one, the antibiotic will be produced and used in really large doses once it enters the market, meaning there are trillions of bacterial cells encountering it, which raises the likelihood of development of resistance. And second, horizontal gene transfer between bacteria means different strains of bacteria can cooperate in defeating it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer)
If no one was using them why do you need to convince management?
There is a very interesting talk/interview with Peter Turchin here https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=q6fx3AN0tlo

It is about the follow up to the book discussed in the link: 'Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth'

https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasociety-Years-Humans-Greatest-Co...

Turchin is the founder of Cliohistory - he is trying to formulate mathematical models that can describe history in the sense that it checks if social theory corresponds to the models - similar (but not identical) idea as the fictional psychohistory of Asimov's foundation series.
I think it's more like it's ethical to murder little kids and weak people because it's easier to do than murdering well-built man.
yes that's what it means to agree, if someone hands you a document and says "sign here" and you just sign without reading it, you have agreed.
Do you know if Pulseway still has a free version?
Does the BMW i series not qualify as real EV?

http://www.bmwusa.com/bmw/bmwi

The range is a little less than what Tesla offers (150 miles), but here in Berlin I see quite a few of them on the road already. Mercedes has a similar model btw:

http://www.mercedes-benz.de/content/germany/mpc/mpc_germany_...

They probably don't get hyped as much as Tesla, but they seem pretty real to me nevertheless.
This has the potential to be a really good article, and it almost starts going down some promising lines, but then misses out on the interesting bits.

Take this quote: BMW hopes its fully autonomous iNext, due in 2021, will revolutionize the industry but in the meantime it will continue to promote its poorly performing i3 as the best option for those looking for a premium zero-emissions car.

Yes, the i3 is a wacky, kind-of ugly design, and it isn't surprising (to me) that it hasn't been a big seller. But the BMW i division is one of the most interesting things happening in the car industry today, and is making cars[1] that are just as innovative as Tesla.

It's a pity that it didn't explore this a bit more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i8
Academic Publishing without Journals: Publication mints coins/points
> repetition (e.g spinach 1, spinach 2, spinach 3, etc.)

Without a looping or sequence construct, this will be hard to avoid, and once you go that route, you might as well adopt a Lisp as your config syntax.

Before there was XML, there was SGML, and SGML has DSSSL, which was a Scheme dialect, and that was a brilliant idea which has been ditched for XML and its surrounding specs. S-Expressions are natural for the task. There are still prominent uses of S-Expressions, even in the OCaml world, where Jane Street uses it for configuration and serialization.

The full power of a Lisp may be too much and risky, but you can restrict the spec and allow only certain constructs, so that you can ensure it will evaluate to a result in a quick and deterministic way.

The little "templating" feature used in gitlab-ci.yml is a huge benefit, and as long as parsers limit the feature, it's a good compromise between complexity and comfort.

There is a lot of experience with using Lisp for configuration, and that experience can be leveraged to come up with a good S-Expressions based config format that's flexible, deterministic, and known to terminate in constant time. If you're careful with the spec, you could even validate the config fully.
I'm as opposed to mass surveillance as anyone on HN, but I've been surprised by this kind of reaction. Why are non-citizens surprised at this lack of constitutional protection? Are there actually any countries whose constitutional protections apply to non-citizens and/or non-residents? I think that would be pretty cool and progressive if it were the case, but I'm not aware of any.
Thank you, great insights. I see already that 3rd point could be a tricky one for me personally...
Couldn't agree more,

This has been my strategy for years working for busy managers.

You have to make the life easy for them. Try to avoid sending open ended questions to them, instead send something that they can either sign-off fully or partially.

If you can't detail out all the requirements on your own, try to reduce the scope of the task until you can and try to give enough context for the manager to say Yes/No.

Also, if anything is vague and you manage to setup a video call to clarify it then make sure to create a slide with your topics on and walk them through 1 by 1. My experience is that visionary minds like startup CEOs have a tendency to go completely off-track otherwise.
Can you point to a link to the patent or article talking about it? Thanks
Of course it does. It is even mentioned in the article.
I'm actually not kidding. My first programs were done on punchcards back in 1974 or 1975. I then moved on to ASR-33s (barf), DECWriters (much better) and then ADM-3A glass terminals (heaven - a working backspace!).

Using a text editor today is not much different than an ADM-3A, it just has more rows and columns on it and the font is slightly, but not much, nicer. (Why do the console fonts suck these days? Jeez)

Edit: the first screen editor I had ran on an ADM-3A and was a TECO macro. I think TECO was the first "tty noise" programming language.
In 24hrs: ShadowCoin's 1,000,000th block
Right, because Tesla announces cars, it delivers years later (and always too late)?
Google for "hidden champions". That's the name given to many of the companies that are actually world & technology leaders in their respective markets but that are unknown even to most people in Germany.
I actually went over why I'd consider this is a better format than TOML:

https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/blob/master/FAQ.rst...
Big business was behind both sides - just let that sink in
When I was in the 6th Form in the UK we were told we had to include a photo with CVs. Another reason you should never take careers advice from someone who became a careers advisor!
Because concept cars are combining efforts into a prototype to test those concepts with. Also, to get a reaction of press and potential customers. Concepts very often contain elements which are adopted by later production models and pointing the way ahead for a whole brand in terms of design language, automotive philosophy and technological advancements. It is far from a waste of talent and resources. Actually, it is necessary for top automakers to stay ahead of the game.
ICMP Firewalling Done Right
Honestly I see this whole WhatsApp debacle as a big old scape goat.

They're putting a big corporation on the spot so they can extort money from it, make people talk about this and ultimately it's just a means to keep spying on every single brazilian citizen.

People say WhatsApp is evil for not cooperating now and pretend the government is a pure entity only seeking good.

Meanwhile they forget we probably just had a silent coup for the presidency, the whole government is corrupt and so is the justice system that is enforcing these rules. I see talks about how evil the americans are for not helping the poor brazilian government, pretending like before WhatsApp existed crime in Brazil was almost non-existent. It's honestly sad.

The best part is that this only generates animosities between citizens, who attack each other because they support "red" or "blue" allowing the corrupt to keep doing whatever they want.

The whole world has shown exemplary individuals that despite living in their corrupt environments stand up and take a stand for us all. Despite that we're stuck pointing fingers at each other with blind faith in our own corrupt governments.

Honestly you can even be right that the brazilian government is "legally" spying on us. That doesn't make it right.

And to say we the author "doesn't know about american government spying" seems extremely naive to me. We probably know more about how corrupt the US government is than any other government on the planet and I doubt he's not aware of that.
I block custom fonts. Some 'designed' typography gives me zero benefits. Page takes forever to load, and entire page is refreshed once font is downloaded.
Oh, it's just a repost. I thought they released version 1.3 with scrollback support.
Printed money is decentralized and anonymous in the cash form.
I really wonder where those customers come from.
Clayton Christensen argues here [1] that Tesla is going to have a problem with BMW etc. - he says that it has been easier in the past to disrupt existing markets from the low end and with low margin products; the field of high margin cars has a lot of sophisticated players that might give Tesla considerable trouble in the long run - on the high end.

Fascinating and very enjoyable talk:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg
Qt 5.8 Alpha released
Permutive (YC S14) is hiring a product engineer (Elm) in London
The title is wrong. This is not a C++ to x86 JIT (which would be really cool), this is a JIT library for C++ (of which there are a number). It has it's own domain specific language for expressions. It doesn't take arbitrary C++. No std C++ syntax, no classes, etc.

Ex:

// nativeJIT DSL
auto & area = expression.Mul(rsquared, expression.Immediate(PI));
auto function = expression.Compile(area);
// C++
auto area = rsquared * PI;
Or for treating livestock, chest pains and flu symptoms in America. Don't forget you'd need the government on side and America's doesn't have a good track record of cooperating with the rest of the world for the global good.
Burnt bread, AKA charcoal.

It just reduces the bad taste, still tastes pretty bad.
How Uber Drivers Decide How Long to Work
Model X has arrived in the UK recently. As a UK company director (contractor), I seem to be able to tax efficiently buy one of these things and get rid of my gas guzzling family 4x4. Anyone done this, I'm still a bit hazy on how the BIK tax and finance costs work?

Should I do it?
The same reason regex engines have their own specific JIT emitters. Limited overhead and size constraints because it's not a strict requirement to pre-compile regexes. It's basically a native dialect of existing automaton generators, where the abstract code is replaced with machine instructions.
Made me think of the quote by Aaron Swartz "The worlds entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitised and locked up by a handful of private corporations."
Because concept cars are actually pretty cheap, and could even be paid from a marketing rather than engineering budget. Creating a new "real" car to the point where it can actually be manufactured, serviced and sold efficiently is incredibly expensive. It's probably at least a 1000x difference in cost.
Usually what happens there is String.toString(null) has been called somewhere (which will return the string "null").

Nulls are fairly normal in Java, and modern Java systems often have ways to define if something can return nulls or not. In the old days you just had to know.
A preview of Guile-Lua (rebirth), and some opinions
Its not even a real article. Just some mindless repetition of some braindead cia propoganda against foreign governments being used to promote a new crypto currency called shadowcash.

Yawn.
>nyone trying to pigeonhole robert-heinlein into any of pejoratives e.g. fascist, racist, militarist etc. etc. has either an axe to grind, or has serious reading comprehension problems.

Pigeonhole as in "he was just/only a militarist" no.

But he was clearly a militarist.
Everyone and their grand mother owns a Kalashnikov in Afghanistan.
How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3
Some more background here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/north-dakota-oil-pipeli...
Tau Station's Tech Stat – Cultured Perl
So, I'm actually surprised no Lisp dialect has gained popularity in the modern web stacks for configuration. Maybe if Clojure were more popular and less XML-influenced from the JVM world. Just thinking out loud.
> That's not to say that you are a mook if you want that, but that idea of a 'safe job' is not something that's particularly big in the hacker world.

The article is from German media. I can't speak for the US, but in Germany it leaves a bad impression if you switch jobs too often. Also in the last 15 years (in particular under the Schröder administration (from 1998-2005)) in Germany there were lots of reforms of the job market that lead to the feeling of many people that the jobs are much less secure and if you lose the job you will move downward socially much faster. This in my opinion explains pretty well why now lots of people want jobs that are more safe. And I see no evidence that this doesn't hold for hackers, too, since it is well-known that it is much more difficult to find a new job in the technology sector in Germany if you are, older than say, 45 years.
Also "mittelstand"
The i3 is ugly, but it's a lot of fun to drive. The only reason I don't own one is that it doesn't have enough range. I make 120-mile trips fairly frequently and it's just not practical for that.
Thanks for the references, I read them.

> inconsistency of results

Atleast on hacker news, the test is fairly consistent. There have been several surveys here.

> lack of statistical analyzability

That is the academic psychologist's problem.

> 89 / 100 fortune 100 companies use it internally

A lot of people hear recommend blindly investing in s&p 500. I trust fortune 100 companies more than psychology associations and bloggers.

> college board chose not to use it

Yes. Because it is one static test that can be memorized to produce desired result by test taker. But if one takes it for their own understanding, there is no reason to cheat (and it becomes useful)

Not convinced that these two blog posts and 1 white paper opinion piece count as discrediting mbti.
I will look for a meta review.

In the end, I think personality testing, similar to iq testing is not politically correct. But it can be useful, as a self test atleast.

Companies prefer to use it but keep the process non transparent. They like the flexibility of being able to say "personality fit" without the transparency of a test because one it doesn't open up liability and two the test is gameable in an adversarial situation.

Atleast I haven't seen any claims of racial differences in mbti, which might make it useful as a way to find engineer / rational types in underrepresented groups in software.
Diversity, being comfortable and ten good principles
True enough. Doctors unafraid to admit not knowing something inevitably impress me the most (to the point of staying their patient even after moving to the other side of the city):

* A young GP who pulled out a medical book in front of me to consult it.

* My dentist who told me he’ll perform the extraction if I want him to, but that his colleague specializes in it and will do a better job.
"could be available within five years."

Ah, the usual codeword for "this won't happen"
What it's like being a color blind designer
Optimizing for Human Understanding
Is it ethical to keep human soldiers on the battlefield in order to have a pretext to return fire?

These are some interesting questions, I have to admit.
Or in other words, the US (and likely a lot of other places) need more plumbers and electricians, but fewer people seem to want to apply for these types of jobs because they're not seen as 'trendy'.

Which isn't surprising, given how white collar work in a startup or internet focused company seems to have almost become a default assumption in the last few years or so.
Not just Hungary, most of Europe outside of the UK seems to do this. I remember finding it a bit odd the first time I had to sift through developer CVs and most of them had photos.
> It's much easier to just talk about infinite sums and be done with it.

Indeed. But it's a lot less fun :-)
It gives direction to new designs within the brand, many design aspects from concept cars are used in one way or another in production later on.
Or else they just buy the upstart.
I really like the article and what I've read from the free pages of the book on Amazon.

The concept of metaethnicity struck a cord with me immediately. I spend quite some time outside the borders of my own country and took care of foreign students during my university time. Thereby I also developed that feeling that a country is not just one ethnic group, but many. And even a single individual doesn't just belong to one group, but to many. Also I personally never was able to associate myself with a single group alone, always felt e.g. hackers have some interesting concepts I agree with, nerds have some interesting concepts I agree with, scientists, Warhammer 40k players, punk rockers, at the same time communists AND capitalists and so forth. But no group alone - so I felt- could represent what I stand for. And that is a real problem when trying to find a purpose in this society I live in, where people believe you are an individualist because you decide which group you fully associate with. That sounds strange and it is.

But something I don't understand. The book defines Asabiya (as quoted in the blog) as this:

> Asabiya of a group is the ability of its members to stick together, to cooperate

So it's a measure of cooperation.

But then the essay goes on to talk about it's competitional aspects:

> If asabiya is supposed to predict the winner of an inter-group contest, then one must be careful to measure it in some way other than by counting victories in inter-group contests.

Why? Why should a cooperative value be measured in wins against others?

I would say the following are good measures of cooperation, and are indirectly(!) able to predict competitive capability as well as comparison of this capability:

- 1 divided by the number of tax frauds, equalized over the population could measure the cooperation of a country

- The total revenue of a company (this is obviously discussable)

- The mean grade of a class (cooperation between teacher and students)

- The number of successfully graduating students of a university

- The average time of a customer in an entertainment park like Legoland or Disneyland

- The total daily amount of tips of a restaurant

Sure, if you have two restaurants and one is able to generate only slightly more tips, then it's hard to say who would win in a competition for customers. But if the numbers are big enough it's quite clear, e.g. if one restaurant makes $10 and the other makes $765 then it's quite clear the second one must cooperate a lot better (of course considering all other factors equal, as is done in science).

Thus I think if we look at "what are they cooperating on? Which values are depending more on the result of cooperation than on the individuals output?" then we can find a lot of ways to measure cooperation without including competition. And I find this very important since the final, visionary (=not achievable) goal should be to get rid of competition altogether. And you can't really do that if you put it in the formula which you then use to measure your success.
Bcachefs
This is where the "100x myth" comes from. If you write a naive scalar algorithm in C, and then you write (almost) the same thing in CUDA, you can get a ~100x speedup. The problem is that most of that speedup is coming from the lack of parallelism and vectorization in the C implementation, which CUDA gives you "for free".

The thing is, this is still a real win for CUDA, because most people aren't going to write highly optimized C. It's just not a hardware win, it's a compiler win. The thing that most people get out of CUDA is not an advantage from running on a GPU, but an advantage of a smart compiler/language design. Most of the same people would get all but 1-5x of the benefits from using something like ISPC[1], which gives a similar programming model as CUDA implemented on the CPU.

In my experience (from the Tesla/GTX 200 era, though I doubt things have changed that much now), such a small boost in performance is not worth the hassle of transferring data to/from the GPU, the (lack of) virtualization, and driver shenanigans/support issues (at one point, I had to suggest someone buy a fake monitor dongle to plug into his GPU to be able to use my code...).

Anyways, it's good to see this thread, people these days think you are crazy for not using the GPU to do big compute workloads.

1. https://ispc.github.io/
Do you have any more information regarding the battery technology?
You can't create a serious serialization format that fails its primary job of serializing data.

What you implemented there isn't a serialization format, it's a SQL DSL. Any time you implement a DSL, the first question should always be: "Have you considered S-Exprs?". If s-exprs do the job, then you just saved yourself having to implement a ton of stuff, including 90% of a spec.
Rover group and British Leyland as they were made some terrible products.
Hiding it in the implementation detail won't get rid of it.

While you can do pointer arithmatic there will be null pointers and while memory is addressible there will be pointer arithmatic.

And while I'm a programmer, I want access to all the functionality the CPU offers.
They may not earn any money in 15-20 years, if they don't become more serious about EVs, though.
Any one of the Whistle-blowers who the current administration has prosecuted (or driven into exile, like Snowden).