skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that there is a lot of revisionism in the concept of "genius".

Just look at the movie "Amadeus". It looks like Mozart genius is the envy of the mediocre Salieri. In fact, Salieri was an incredible composer himself.

Then you have people like John Carmack. He is a figure in the game industry. But one of the best Doom ever has been developed without him.

The solitary genius creates an interesting narrative, but it is just a simplification of the reality. Too much get attributed to individuals once they achieve fame. This is similar to the "survivor bias", where we also attribute more to the individual and his ideas and abilities than it really is worth.

> Hailed for his “otherworldly ingenuity,” Tao won the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006 at the age of 31. Yet he rejects lofty notions of genius. What really matters, he writes, is “hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”

This is for me, a more down to earth, realistic explanation.
If you are thinking of using a management company, know that they have it pretty well figured out. Their fees will take almost all of your rental income after mortgage and taxes and insurance. So you'll end up with property that the tenants paid for (no small thing) but no real cash flow.
If Hacker News cargo-cults an actual scientific culture long enough, maybe it will transform into one.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics are not half bad.
Sure, why not? Worst case, they'll know how they got hired.
Why do you think this was an enjoyable read?

It's probably bad to guess Ed's personality from just one article, but most of what he says is said by the bullies in software dev who push their own tasks to "Done" on the cost of the whole team, to then say how much more efficient they are since they have closed more tasks than anybody else.

Also the goal is not to beat Mozart, but to provide regular, recurring quality background music for tv show episodes every day, if you want to earn your bread and butter with it, and not just win a price. That's done best by a cooperating team, not by a rockstar. So if he was part of the "top 5 of 60" employees it may have been an improvement to overall results if there were just the other 55 employees. The general success of today's McD is that they are open nearly 24/7 and that they are nearly everywhere you go. I bet McD makes more money now than back in his "glorious" days.
Thanks! I really enjoyed this article. Seemed well balanced on a complicated subject.
There are resources for many endeavors that greatly increase the likelihood of success. It might be a Harvard education. It might be YC's startup school. It might be a retraining program in Kentucky. All are scarce and therefore selective.

One of the things each offers is sustained direct access to other people's time and in particular sustained direct access to expert's time. That's the difference between a personally tailored answer and closed as duplicate on StackOverflow. It's the difference between here's the answer and ten other things I can tell you about and here's someone else's question and several divergent answers to your duplicate question which might not have been the same.
I was wondering about the same thing. Would the forcing pressure of such a laser be great enough to deorbit heavy things? I know that a laser + sail has been suggested as one way of accelerating objects in space, so presumably so?

Maybe the US military would want to bankroll something like this. "Mostly used for peaceful space junk clean up... mostly"
Someone's working on something like that already https://github.com/lexi-lambda/hackett
I had high hopes there, but I don't see an app, I just see enough boilerplate to put a <span>Hello, world!</span> into the DOM, which could have been done by just writing that into HTML. I can understand what it's doing, but I don't think it's a good example of how you can write an actual app without the parts people are mentioning.
"May be worse"

You make it sound like the negative effects are all political, and you can't really quantify them. As far as air-quality, isn't natural gas much better than coal?
When "reach a milestone in computing history" is written 4 times before getting to the content (hn title, article title, article summary, first sentence of article), the article feels a lot like click bait, which really discourages me from wanting to give it any of my time. Anyone want to write a tldr?
Company name is TRO LLC.

That is hilarious.
I assume "less energy", not "no energy", but in any case, what better alternative would you suggest in a grid with significant amounts of intermittent sources, like 70%?
> It's divisive and trivialises the accomplishments and struggles of people who aren't "geniuses".

I agree. But I will add that it also devalues the hard work of "geniuses". The concept of "geniuses" don't bring any value to anyone, except to novel writers. :)
That's true. Hiring a human, period, is costly.
I would say Tao had everything this article talks about. Innate intelligence, a great environment where his parents made sure of his opportunities, and the hard work and persistence required to succeed.
What optical solution are they using for 100x100G?
>I don't think microservices, react, functional programming or no sql are examples of 'hype'; I think those are good engineering decisions (depending on the problem domain).

The two are orthogonal. Hype is a marketing force which can be used to tout good and bad stuff.

Teams can just as well adopt a good product if its hyped. That doesn't mean their adoption process was based on a "good engineering decision". Just that they lucked onto making one.

That said, I find "microservices" or "no sql" as more hype than substance in the domains that most teams apply them. They just reimplement (poorly) a ton of stuff that a monolith or sql would already have, and don't really need either for their use case.
Those are great points, my solution don't use Redux, Mobx and React Router and webpack if you can. React itself is great thought, but for some reason it's surrounded by over-engineered yet popular projects.
Nothing positive or negative about it. Call me a destructive pessimist but I've thought a lot about this topic and I'm pretty sure that mankind will burn up all Cole that it can get its hands on (same for oil, gas and uranium). The first figure in the Wikipedia article backs me up at this point. On the world map of Cole reserves, GB is a white spot now.
Instead of celebrating such acomplishments that are neglectable in the Longview we should think about the implications of burning up all fossils.
This makes a lot of sense. In practice each component can function as a complexity-hiding layer, making integrations with other code a breeze compared to the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer
You can also look at some Susskind talks. He is a very good explainer. They don't skim on the math, but it's followable for somebody with a high-school level of math, at least for the basic concepts like spin or bell inequality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PLQrxduI9Pd...
Javascript is always dramatically overused at the top of every market cycle: DHTML in 1999, Web 2.0 in 2008, Angular/React/etc now. This too shall pass. And then reappear, worse.

If you are truly sick of javascript, I have something for you:

http://intercoolerjs.org
>without virtually any money
I'm glad this has shown up here, I discovered it very shortly after publication and it completely overhauled the way I thought about language design. I'm currently intermittently working on a language based on this concept, as an environment to create languages that compile to LLVM bytecode to complement Racket's environment to create languages that compile to untyped lambda calculus
OK - I'll report back and let HN know how it goes. :-)

(I have a full-time gig at the moment right now until September, so it'll be a little while).
Good point, but scientific papers can have larger ramifications in social policy,funding allocation(billions of tax dollars), even daily public life (food guidelines).

It's also far more important for science to keep its hands clean because fair or not its public relations is important.
In our high technological society, we cannot allow people to lose faith in the scientific process, It would be a global disaster.
That is exactly what I plan to do.
Well done, brave Throwaway. Now please keep flagging articles with no charts, even the ones who cater to your belief system.
> We need to redirect people to find esteem in useful work (building community, reducing waste, generating value).

I think this is the most important revelation. While I'm a proponent of the UBI as well, I think this is the harder part which we need to find a good solution to; it seems likely that if you give free money to all the opiod addicts, its only going to make their problems worse (making a really huge generalization here; not suggesting all unemployed people are addicts).
How much money do you lose (say... per second) when you have a minor (few seconds) of service interruption when switching to a hot fail-over RDBMS and waiting for it to be promoted to master?
While I agree that having productive work is good for one's self esteem, I'm not sure you can say the same about explicitly unproductive work.

Imagine a job where people were paid to fold letters and put them into envelopes.

If there was no affordable, reliable automation that would be productive work, good for self-esteem. But if the company had automated all the real mailings, and out of charity the boss kept humans folding blank pages that were tossed in the trash? I doubt that job would be as good for the self esteem.
I don't think so. There are subreddit (ab)used for even sillier thing than that: see RedditStorage[1] for example.

[1]: https://github.com/rossem/RedditStorage
You'd include all the modules as separate script files. Each script file is a revealing module[0] that exports its API to a global variable. If you're interested I could put together a more complete boilerplate. I don't actually use this approach much in front-end work these days, but it can be nice to work with just text editor and browser.

As for building it, you're on your own. You could run jsx from the command line, concat them all together and minify.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5647258/how-to-use-reveal...
Something I've found recently on projects is that the npmcompare site makes it much easier to pick the library that has all the traction. It becomes very stark when you're comparing the package with 350k weekly downloads with one which has been downloaded by the original author and his cousin.
It ain't just a 1% gain. Use a Python list if you want to append/pop.
> ... creating more tone deaf people than any other ecosystem in the history of the world.

Okay, the Juicero "$400 Capri Sun squeezer" may be funny (and they're even suing a rival juice packet squeezer for stealing their IP), but SV is hardly unique. Whenever you give buckets of money to people who provide nothing of real value in exchange, you create and/or attract entitled and oblivious leeches like Marie Antoinette, Leona Helmsley, and Larry Page: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/googles-ceo-rules-and-taxes-are-... .
> so LED ligts save a lot of energy

Actually HPS lights are very efficient, pretty much the same as LEDs on a Lumens per Watt.
People also reported that Hillary would win. In reality so far I don't see how 15->16 is different than 14->15
Link to paper: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01185079/document
Yep.

Jordan Peterson has discussed how important IQ is in the modern economy and how both the left and the right are in denial about it. While the left thinks anyone can be anything, the right thinks lazy people just need to work harder. Both are wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

Difficult problem.
That'd be so much faster using a generator and a NumPy.concatenate at the end. Orders of magnitude faster, if we're talking about a large CSV.
Have you tried XMMS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS
>Ok, if what the smartest and best people are doing isnt the right solution for my problem, what is?

Obviously only what "the smartest and best people are doing" to solve problems that are isomorphic to yours.

But first you also need to identify those people: who said those in the big companies (or smaller with better bloggers) are the "smartest and best people"? Just because they belong to a succesful company? And because they have degrees from some top-tier university?

The company could be succesful despite of its technology, on the business value alone (which usually is how it is), and the people with "good degrees" could just be architecture astronauts or fresh amateurs who re-invent long buried concepts because they don't know better.

There's a whole long distance between what the current industry champions as "best minds" (some 20 year old with 2 years of JS that created the framework du jour) and people like Knuth, Alan Kay, Kernighan, Richie, Bill Joy, and the like...
Mirillis Action 2.4.0 and Crack Serial Key
There are plenty of real research studies and articles (often displayed on HN) that show the growing inequality in the US, with correlations between that inequality and lots of negative social outcomes. If we want to debate inequality, we should do it on one of those articles, not this 0-content opinion piece.
"I'd rather see a comparison of how ethical issues are handled between SV and non-SV privately-held companies."

Given complete lack of attention and interest given to the latter, I wouldn't be surprised if the situation isn't any different, if not worse.

The only thing that led to actions being taken against Uber, UA, VW, Wells, is public shaming and media coverage.
Nah, locality is expected to be violated. Bell test experiments have proven this for like forever, and rather recently a very accurate test with very few loopholes was conducted too.

They used a new kind of locality and proved it was broken too. Interesting, but not groundbreaking.
8values
Not sure if that would really work. Understanding science, math, and engineering using analogies leads to misconceptions when one tries to apply them. The math is true understanding. If you understand the equation, then you not only understand the subject, but often what would happen if you tweaked the inputs...etc. Although it would be nice if Wikipedia had an ELI5 section on its physics articles to go through first, so I agree with you there.
Is there a quantum limit on speed of computation?
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Yes, being a landlord isn't "easy money" but if you're willing to work a little you can make a lot of money slowly.

I've never seen someone loose their ass on a rental property, I'm sure it happens but you'd have to ignore the fundamentals. You can download plenty of spreadsheets online that will calculate whether a property cash flows or not before you even call the real estate agent. You insure everything, and put the cheapest everything into fixes.

Source: I grew up fixing and painting my dads houses in between renters.
Russia is behind Brexit? You are breaking new ground here, care to provide a reference? Also, it is good to know that Russia is behind Orban, Erdogan too.
Big Data and the Well-Being of Women and Girls [pdf]
My point is you can forgive someone for that kind of error when there are articles making the round from semi-reputable sources that include quotes from sources that appear to back up their claims. Especially when it doesn't seem to have a political slant or angle to it (aside, possibly, from someone at Facebook deciding for PR reasons they should frame this as a complete rewrite, in which case you're being lied to by the people doing the work, so where does that leave you?)
UK is not dependent on Russian gas. There's some, but not dominant.

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/our-world-of-energy/...

- 45 % is from UK production

- 17 % is from LNG tankers (much of that is from Middle East)

- 38 % is from European pipelines, of which 35 % is from Russia.

In other words, Russian supply is about 13 %.

The NY Times article manages to ignore one significant source of electric power, though: about 20 % of British electricity is nuclear. That is not mentioned at all, it just speaks of wind and solar. This is a typical narrative by journalists and in my view it diminishes the credibility of media.
Which markets can't tolerate only having a couple nines of availability?
Facebook is the world's largest PHP shop. Does that mean that everyone should use PHP?

As it turns out, moving fast and breaking things isn't all that conducive to quality engineering[1][2]. Facebook has a massive legacy code base maintained by an enormous team that is under pressure to iterate quickly while supporting what is arguably the world's largest user base. They are dealing with extremely specialized constraints that most of us will never encounter. Many of the trade-offs they consider acceptable aren't trade-offs that make sense elsewhere.

And that's exactly what the blog post is getting at. A lot of these emerging technologies are situationally useful in a particular set of scenarios and environments, but developers with cargo cult mentality convince themselves that these things will solve all of their problems if they use them everywhere. When the disappointment sets in and they figure out that isn't the case, yesterday's darling stack becomes the subject of today's "considered harmful" essays and everybody moves on to the next shiny thing.

The point here is that maybe you should make a sober assessment of new technologies and objectively evaluate whether they are actually practical for your usage scenario rather than just blindly jumping on the bandwagon and using something.

The examples from the blog post are totally on point. I previously worked at a company that built a NoSQL database and I have great affinity for the technology, but there's no question that too many people adopted NoSQL databases without really understanding the trade offs. People want to be "web scale" so they go straight to using databases that are designed for high-availability clustering even when they are building applications that would be perfectly fine running forever on a single postgres instance.

[1] https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-p...
[2] http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707
Looks like you're right. I didn't realize that most student don't get exposed to Big O until their first real algorithms course.
The particulate pollution that makes city air unhealthy is a totally different issue from carbon pollution and climate change.
I just read in, I think, Bloomberg, that the unemployment rate for STEM secondary education is around 2.4%. Do you have any numbers to support your statement (I obv don't have any)?
Given the controversial nature of the title, I was at least hoping the article would have some evidence to support its claims. I didn't spot any.

The arguments within are sketchy at best. Yes, some aid is misguided. Yes, a few $bn isn't enough to completely overturn the fate of humanity. But jumping from that to the conclusion that aid is a mistake and less money is somehow better than the pennies we're currently sending is not a rigorous argument!

A lot of this article paints progress as dismal and exists basically to put supporters in a bad light. Gates' 2014 annual letter would disagree[1], and points out that for all the lack of funding, important progress has been made. If you want to argue to cut off vital life support for millions of people, I'd like to see a little more than hearsay for your beliefs.

[1] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Medi...
I like to think that a genius is a person who looks at life from a different angle than the rest of us, who isn't limited by what people tell them to be or do, who want to know why something is the way it is and not just accept it, and who is not afraid to ask or answer difficult questions.
He's an econ prof at MIT, and is getting back at the hard science people who have bullied him for years? I propose FIRE is a more appropriate acronym against which to direct one's ire over the state of society.
No, but slumlord is.

"Lord of the Slum", is like "Lord of the Dance", who prances around on people's backs.
I don't know about people actually believing they have more intrinsic value because they make more than minimum wage, I just think the problems comes from a few areas:

- They were/are getting treated like shit and are transferring the energy on

- People are increasingly 'busy' leading to higher levels of stress and anxiety that just have them snapping easier

- There's a lot more of us than there used to be, so even if the percentages stayed constant, there's a lot more f%cking twats running around out there

Especially with younger people I professionally interact with (I'm 34), but also with age peers, I've noticed that a shockingly large percentage have never had that job experience of working at a place that was crappy, for minimal pay, bad hours, tough work, etc. Generally they didn't work at all until maybe a couple of internships in college, or some other form of light entry into the workforce. I think it really does something to create a lack of empathy for those people not in a situation exactly like ours.

My personal belief is it doesn't matter what our two situations are, being an asshole is being an asshole. If you're going to be a jerk to someone who's working a random lunch counter, you're probably just generally a jerk the majority of the time. Wealth, status, fame, are no excuses for a lack of human decency.
The article does not respond to the claim of the president that windmills kill birds. Do they really in a significant way? Is it worthy of being called an environmental disaster?
We can test your 30 year old cars feeling with numbers. Less than 10% of vehicles on the road in the US are 21 or more years old:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-3/pdf/americans-aging-au...
I've introspected, thought, and read about this for several decades, and here is roughly what I think at present. What's perceived as genius is really a path. One either stumbles upon or is led to a certain useful mental tool, probably in very early childhood. That tool unlocks new paths, as in a video game skill tree, with new tools to be discovered and leveraged. Schoolwork looks completely different to the person armed with these tools. Nature itself looks different.

People have commented my whole life on "how easy things come" to me. I understand why they think that. The only visible product is the grades and professional accomplishments. Internally though, it felt like an arduous, epic struggle, and a continuous obsessive search for more powerful ways in which to think.

These things surely interact with whatever heritable intelligence exists, but they are also separate from it.
This one does cater to my belief system. Have we reached the point where it's nearly inconceivable that one can actually agree with a conclusion but still find the reasoning and evidence sloppy (or nonexistent)?
I've definitely seen overuse of React, microservices, and NoSQL databases before it makes sense or when it's actually a detriment to complexity.

This point from the article however, I agree is a bad example.

> Example 2: TDD is dead by DHH

The 37signals guys if anything are some of the realest in terms of low fidelity tools and sensible abstractions and building things simply. They've even written two books about their approach to business and web app development (Rework, Getting Reals). Maybe there is concentrated hype around Rails but in general their stuff is well informed and well thought out.
Not sure where you got that notion, but coming from an M back ground I know that M is in high demand, for example, in computer/data science, insurance, or consulting.
Nearly half of young Americans won’t fly United anymore