skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper." (Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.)

This totally describes me. The line I quoted resonates because sometimes the idea of a boring task is actually frightening to me, in the way you described. Like I get a really sick feeling about it and will do almost anything to avoid it. On the other hand I feel like I have so much going on in my head, and so much I could produce if I could only channel it properly. The TV is most definitely always on. My lack of focus and procrastination has definitely held me back in my career.

One thing I'm wary of is medicalising what might just laziness. How do I know it's not a version of "special snowflake syndrome"? Is my own inattentiveness (and inability to get over it) really so much worse than what a "normal" person experiences?

To give a parallel, I heard a podcast where Ramit Sethi was talking about "introvert porn", where he's saying there is all this stuff online about how hard life is for introverts, how extroverts don't get it, basically making people feel good about being an introvert and telling them that it's an integral part of who they are rather than something they can change. And he's saying that this is a dangerous and self-defeating trap to get into because people don't realise that social skills can be learned. All these "introverts" are just falling back onto an excuse to avoid confronting the thing that's holding them back.

If I start blaming all my problems on ADHD am I just falling into a similar trap? After all, not everyone can be successful. Maybe I'm just not successful because I'm not that good at anything, not because of a medical condition.

Possibly relevant: I am in the UK where ADHD seems to be a lot less recognised than in the USA. People here are often critical of the idea of medicating ADHD in kids (which is relatively unusual here afaik). I don't know how a British GP would react to someone asking for an adult ADHD diagnosis - I imagine it wouldn't be taken very seriously.
> Climate change isn't a person, the people we should be fighting are the people CAUSING climate change, and that isn't me or you.

Yes, it is.

This isn't really controversial or even an arguable position; the tragedy of the commons is a well known and accepted economic theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Remind me what plants are fed, again?
Migration target like visual cobol (not a joke). Just look at those smiling hipsters writing cobol.net on their laptop.

https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/visual-cobo...
Tiddlywiki

http://tiddlywiki.com/
Tilting your phone – a new way for hackers to steal your passwords
> It is a bold premise that the evolutionary process and human technological civilization have the same optimization goals.

We have similar, when we optimize for "what works" (instead for e.g. "what sells").

The only existing instance of what we're trying to build - intelligence - is something a dumb, random, incremental optimization process following simple rules managed to somehow stumble upon. Now, if there's a strong local optimum in the design space of intelligent machines, then it seems plausible that evolution ended up there, and that we may stumble upon it too, thus converging with the evolutionary solution somehow.

Now I'm not saying our solution will be identical to biological brains. We have different goals (hell, we have goals, nature does not). But we're likely to end up doing many aspects of it in a way that resembles biology.

The core observation here is that it's the structure of reality (implications of laws of physics) that shape the search space we're traversing. Compare flight. Yes, human planes are very different from birds - but that's because they have less efficient energy sources, and also because we want them to go faster (have you ever seen a supersonic bird?). Still, both share some aspects, like the airfoil. Both we and nature "discovered" those because airfoils are dictated by the laws of physics - that's how you do flight in gases.

--

Basically, what I'm saying is that humans always describe things in terms of the technology of their age, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Better technology means better description. Birds are unlike planes, but analyzing them using the model of airfoil we developed is a good idea and leads to more and better understanding.

--

EDIT

> Optimization seems to require some objective. In a practical sense, you cannot optimize a piece of software if you don't know what you are optimizing for.

Yes, optimization always has an objective - that's how we define it, in contrast to complete randomness. But the objective can be implicit or explicit. Explicit goals require a mind to be involved. Evolution has only implicit objectives, human-driven process have both (because we suck at knowing what we actually want).

But the second important part of an optimization process is the shape of the optimization space. This here is defined by laws of physics. And insofar as evolution's implicit objective is in some aspects similar to our objective, both get similarly influenced by the shape of the optimization space :).
> I think employees tend to think that culture is what they're there for instead of producing IP

Yeah, how dare they...
> Any of the new hires with talent quickly discover they can double their salary by doing pretty much anything else in IT and move on.

Not necessary. They do not know current frameworks and tools and probably don't know the knowledge is transferable.

Effectively, they need to find a company willing to train them and the one that hires by aptitude on whiteboard test only.
What's sad is that people see it as an endpoint. While the thing is obviously meant to be a starting point, a baseline of "good design" that you can expand on if you wish, or stick to if you have better things to do.
It moves the baseline from zero design to "good" .
yeah but you're holed up 7 days straight to fix something, so it quickly adds up.
> Agile can never work in an agency, where the client has control over budgets, deadlines, and features. There is simply no incentive for the client to compromise when your agency has made some pretty ridiculous promises and put themselves on the hook to deliver.

There's an interesting triad that I've been talking to people about a lot recently.

1. Authority (the ability to make decisions of importance)

2. Accountability (a way of telling if you are doing better or worse)

3. Responsibility (pride and reward proportional to the results you deliver)

Essentially when you lack any of those three, you cannot operate effectively.

Without accountability, you have no way of knowing what success is. Without authority, you have no power to recruit help or make the necessary changes to be successful, and without responsibility, no amount of accountability or authority matters.

This is especially true in asymmetrical relationships like customer-vendor and employee-employer.
I don't think you deserve the downvotes, and I agree with you that using taxes to price in the externalities of releasing carbon will help contribute to a solution. That said, I think you might be underestimating the problem. We've been trying for decades to get it under control, and as the article shows, the problem is rapidly accelerating, not improving, or even worsening at a steady rate.

We also don't know what the effect of a rapid multi-degree temperature increase will be. It's possible that it could set off positive feedback loops that will make the problem much worse. Maybe it won't, but it would be nice not to take the risk.

I agree that CO2 is very unlikely to end human civilization. But it could certainly make things much less pleasant than they need to be for a long time. In my opinion it's worth a significant amount of short-term pain to rein it in as much as possible.
I'd go a step further and say that agencies can never work, at least past the small project or website level. The customer is oblivious to the maintenance required for a software project (even if it's just maintaining developer familiarity with the code base) and the agency can only ever get them to pay for features.
As someone who has been through a similar phase (during my Ph.D.) that lasted years, and who has seen close friends go through the same, I hope the following will help.

During this phase, I found myself unable to step back from the little failures and hiccups I hit along the way. I was unable to see the big picture or look at the effect of small efforts made in the long term. As a result, whenever something would go wrong or even appear to go wrong on a goal I had set out to do, it would immediately trigger a flood of gated emotions that I had held back to start pursuing that goal in the first place.

The only way I managed to dig myself slowly out of my state of mind was to force 'small wins' on a day-to-day basis.

Go to the gym. Get out of bed and finish a morning routine. Read two to five pages of a book before bedtime. Try cooking a new recipe on a Sunday afternoon. Have a date-night with your spouse to reconnect. And so on. I started by forcing similar small wins for a month and found myself gaining the confidence to push towards bigger goals, except with a significantly better outlook this time around.

My advice would be to set up the smallest goals you can, and then go accomplish them. Remove the possibility of failure from the equation. Start with just one and go sequentially in the beginning. Specifically, activities like sports and exercise have built-in metrics that let you see clear progress over time. The confidence that comes from these small wins provides the foundation to push yourself a little farther as time goes on. Confidence breeds confidence. Start with one aspect of your life (e.g. health, or relationship with spouse) and slowly expand into the other parts of your life. When things go wrong, just re-think the goal; break it down further or simplify and try again.

From my own personal experience, a surefire way to fail is to initially set yourself up with goals that require significant time or patience. With an inability to step back and see that failure in the short term doesn't imply failure in the long term, it risks spiraling you back into old patterns that only provide negative reinforcement.

Hope this helps.
terminal screens needn't be old. they can be quite fast to operate.
> The exception added for computer programs arose from this case, but did not address the RAM copy doctrine. It makes an explicit exemption for "(c)Machine Maintenance or Repair." only. If you're not maintaining or repairing your friend's machine, but you still load up a game he's installed, you've technically made an infringing copy, just as this computer tech had, because you are not doing it for "maintenance or repair".

This should fall under 17 USC 101(a)(1), "Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy".

> Another contrived example under RAM copy doctrine: if you've downloaded a song illegally, you are not on the hook for only the copy on your hard disk, but the number of plays, since each one is a distinct infringing copy created by your computer loading the music into its memory repeatedly.

When a plaintiff sues for copyright infringement and wins, he can ask for actual damages plus the infringer's profits (17 USC 504(b)), or he can ask for statutory damages (17 USC 504(c)).

If he asks for actual damages and profits, then the number of times the song was played will only be relevant if somehow the more it was played the more it caused actual damage to the plaintiff or if the downloader was doing something that made money from playing the song repeatedly.

If he asks for statutory damages, they are awarded per work infringed, not per infringing copy. The number of times the copy was actually played would probably only have an affect on the outcome if the defendant was trying to argue that they had not intentionally downloaded the song. (The "a virus must have downloaded it!" or "it must have been one of my kids!" approach is popular).
> non-geek people don't have a clue who produces the apps

Funny, that sounds to me like a counterargument to the idea that this makes things look like they come from google.
For (1), you might want to look into http://dontprint.net. Of course it doesn't solve annotation issues but for reading it works well enough.
From what I've seen there are still a lot of banks who haven't yet realised that they are software houses. Anything that gets outsourced obviously isn't seen as part of the core functionality of the organisation and yet we still see things like 2000 IT staff getting sent over to IBM from Lloyds in the UK (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/13/lloyds_to_outsource...)
Part of it is they want to know that the AI isn't discriminating in illegal ways (eg using race as a feature).

I also worked with the data science guys at a telecom in a past startup and they were so used to using white-box models that the thought of not having a decision tree or other means of explaining how the results came about scared them, just because they weren't used to it and they could check it for correctness etc. Not having that was scary to them.
> HTML is for devs. They're the ones that deal with it.

As devs, we can view this html through a browser and use in-browser dev tools to view the associated CSS. There's no need to explain the style in the HTML.
We have most platforms from IBM, z (Mainframe), iSeries (AS/400), p (AIX), plus about everything windows.

Moving off core systems (z/i/p) isn't simple mostly because of the amount of data combined with all the custom applications. every attempt to move the apps off the z don't come to fruition because of scope and the fact it just works. the i is increasing its load to pick up from the z and getting a good dose of webfacing and rest services. these are dead simple to implement and many reuse all the existing code.

talent wise, it really hasn't been much of a challenge in Atlanta/Dallas to find those who can support what is needed. the language isn't the biggest road block for many mainframe systems, its the file systems that can trip people. the i is pure DB2 so anyone versed in SQL can use it and RPG looks more like Pascal these days than that three column stuff people normally associate with it.

the one thing many here don't understand is just how many companies are invested in mainframe, i, and large p series systems. don't scoff at these platforms. with modern tools they can be webfaced just fine and the advantage their default coding languages have is they are business math oriented and simple. with modern features and file systems it just comes down to, what is management comfortable with and does it serve the companies needs.
Attend the free Berlin Meetup with Webpack's Juho Vepsäläinen
That's still at least 2x the take-home on even the highest paying permanent roles outside of London.
Ask HN: How to go from zero to hired as a game developer at Naughty Dog?
Naughty Dog is just an example.

I'm an undergraduate who has mostly done web development and information security. Game development seems interesting but at the same time it feels difficult to get started.

Have experience with the following languages in descending order of skills Python,Lua, Java, C, C++.
Hmm, that doesn't seem to work here (The Netherlands). Maybe that's US only?
They mean big Twitter users like news organizations and the like who have a vested interest in Twitter.
> But it's a mistake to think that you want to remove process.

It's also a mistake to keep a process that isn't delivering any benefit though. I've seen very few stand-ups that provided a benefit and zero where there was no other way to get the same benefit.
Digital Ocean is down
Ask HN: Mailing lists that HN readers ought to know about?
I subscribe to a variety of information feeds through email mailing list subscription. There's at least one mailing list that seems to get my attention on a regular basis, namely that produced by KurzweilAI: http://www.kurzweilai.net

The mailing list seems to touch on cutting edge news across AI research and business.

What do you subscribe to that you think others would benefit by if they were to as well?
Front end freedom with a moltin-powered ReactJS eCommerce store
SFO2 went dark about 4 hours ago. The CP is now down as well
I feel like that's a play for job security more than anything else.
Has anyone here who's not trying to lose weight try any of these diets? I'm thinking of trying the every other day diet because it supposedly helps your immune system and boost focus (I don't know the validity of this part). I have no intention of losing weight though and have actually been trying to gain weight.
Unfortunately Rust uses an LLVM fork IIRC, so using it is non-trivial.
I never really intuited how the time domain and frequency domain related until I looked at the animation mentioned in the article[1] - I really wish I had seen that gif earlier since it shows the frequency and time domains as orthogonal (literally).

Edit: I've realized that our comment was on series, not transforms.

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Fourier_...
I did not say growth was exponential, I only pointed out what growth has been in the last years.

It is reasonable to expect growth rate will decline. Right now a billion people is predicted to be added every ~13 years. Even if the growth rate declines, population cannot continue to grow forever.
That's why I call it DeplorablesBook but that's also where the problem lies maybe. Most probably. Maybe certainly. We need to engage in those tiresome discussions collectively. We need to talk more, with more people from more diverse backgrounds if we want to change anything actually.

Let's educate everyone so that we get an even better internet than the one we came to love back in the 90s and early 00s!

Just got a recommendation for this great correlating speech by a friend actually:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70&feature=youtu.be...
Would be great.

I've been toying around with IPFS lately, but I still haven't figured out how me getting the repo leads to me joining a global network of peers, with data travelling seamlessly between us. I want the latter, just don't know if it's even supported now.
As a user it's super un-intuitive, though. At least how gmail, calendar, maps and other google apps are on Android at the moment. I mostly click and pray.
I read this in a drug information pamphlet a long time ago; basically it said that cocaine and heroin both bind to a different set of receptors to the other, but alcohol binds to both. Which is what makes it uniquely addictive. Its obviously not as strong as either of those drugs but combines the nature of both.
How to reduce incorrect email addresses – Hacker Noon
A Computational Method for Identifying Extreme Redistricting Plans [pdf]
As far as I can tell the link you provide argues exactly the opposite of what you're saying:

> In a warmer future climate, there will be an increased risk of more intense, more frequent and longer-lasting heat waves.

> In a warmer future climate, most Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models project increased summer dryness and winter wetness in most parts of the northern middle and high latitudes. Summer dryness indicates a greater risk of drought. Along with the risk of drying, there is an increased chance of intense precipitation and flooding due to the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere.

> In concert with the results for increased extremes of intense precipitation, even if the wind strength of storms in a future climate did not change, there would be an increase in extreme rainfall intensity.

> There is evidence from modelling studies that future tropical cyclones could become more severe, with greater wind speeds and more intense precipitation. Studies suggest that such changes may already be underway; there are indications that the average number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year has increased over the past 30 years. Some modelling studies have projected a decrease in the number of tropical cyclones globally due to the increased stability of the tropical troposphere in a warmer climate, characterised by fewer weak storms and greater numbers of intense storms. A number of modelling studies have also projected a general tendency for more intense but fewer storms outside the tropics, with a tendency towards more extreme wind events and higher ocean waves in several regions in association with those deepened cyclones.

How do you get from that to your statement: 'The low end is that extreme weather events get less frequent'?

You are also simply repeating your assertion 'but the amount is such that you're not going to get hit with more extreme weather over the next century than what you would get if you were a bit unlucky', citing no evidence.
One problem with the section on Canada is that they look at CO2 extraction. Canada looks like a big contributor here because it's a net exporter of fossil fuels. However, focusing on supply hasn't worked at any point to date and isn't likely to work at any point in the future. As long as people are buying fossil fuels, extractors are going to produce them and find (less efficient/more dangerous) ways to get them to market if infrastructure like pipelines are blocked. The only efforts that have ever successfully curbed fossil fuel production temporarily were OPEC's self-imposed caps, which were entirely motivated towards maintaining high oil prices and not reducing CO_2 emissions.

It seems logical to address the demand instead, but this is hard too. EV's are a promising technology, but have next to no impact at present. A few of the richer people in the richest nations on Earth can afford them, but that's it. We need to find ways to curb fossil fuel consumption by typical drivers in places like Mumbai and Shanghai. The problem is, battery technology just isn't getting cheap enough fast enough. If we could produce a sub $5000 compact EV today, it would still take several decades for them to replace the majority of cars currently in use. EV's also need to be able to compete in agriculture, where vehicles need to be capable of endurance well beyond road cars.

If we want to get CO_2 levels under control quickly we're basically going to have to tax gasoline to the point where people are forced to drive less and pay more for everything that uses fossil fuels in their production, including food. We might even need a mileage tax that scales with income so that the rich are forced to drive less too. Unfortunately, this basically means asking politicians around the world to fall on their swords and take one for the planet.

If we can't address supply or demand, all we can really hope for is to develop the technology to get us out of this bind. Either a magical battery/capacitor technology, scalable carbon sinks, or some kind of geoengineering project like a space-sunshade to partially block the sun. It's risky to wait for tech to be developed, and perhaps even riskier to engage in geoengineering projects that may have unintended side-effects. I like the sunshade idea[1] because it's easily reversible, but it's still risky and nobody is seriously working on the idea as far as I know. However, it seems as though putting payload into orbit might become radically cheaper before EV's have a global impact. This option may be more attractive in a decade or so, and may be a more important use of commercial spaceflight capability than starting a colony on Mars.

A lot of people are against any form of geoengineering because they believe it will give people hope for an easy solution without the need to curb our use of fossil fuels. The problem is, people are already hoping that easy solutions, like EV's, will enable them to carry on as usual without serious sacrifice. Given the global lack of will to sacrifice quality of life for the good of the environment, we need to have other options available.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade