skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is Feynman from the introduction to his Feynman Lectures on Physics:

The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view — which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students — is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think the system is a failure. Of course, my friends point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who — very surprisingly — understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first rate background in physics — and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. ” (Gibbon)

Richard P. Feynman, 1963

http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_91.html

Note that by his own account, most of his students did not do well. James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius, has a longer discussion of the disappointing results of his lectures to undergraduates at Caltech, many of whom reportedly stopped attending the lectures as they were not getting anything useful out of them.

That Feynman in fact had difficulty explaining freshman physics to the highly qualified students at Caltech surely does not indicate he did not understand freshman physics.

Some topics are simply very complex. It is not clear that they can always be conveyed in simple terms. In some cases, a "big picture" explanation may be possible but the details remain complicated. In some cases, a hand-waving analogy to some everyday phenomenon may create the illusion of understanding but be misleading or wrong.

To give a specific modern example, a state of the art video codec such as H.264 is extremely complex, built of many complicated components and sub-algorithms. While it may be possible to explain the big picture in relatively simple terms, the detailed implementation and operation is not simple. The inability of someone who creates or implements a video codec to explain it in simple terms to a layman is not an indication that they do not understand it.
Yeah, I started seeing intermittent CloudFront error pages in the past hour.
I don't think the idea is that you must always explain all of the things in eli5 fashion.
> If you rehash it in smaller words, just by information density alone, aren't you guaranteed to be losing some detail?

Yes, but knowing which information you can lose is why it is said that you don't understand it until you can explain it. Explaining it in simple terms forces you to over-simplify, and then you have to pick which information is important and which isn't...and doing that requires a deep understanding of the subject (and your audience).
The allegations are serious enough for there to be multiple ongoing official investigations, and were enough to get Flynn fired, I don't see what's so generous about that.

Lying under oath to Congress is pretty bad, and when you lie about never meeting Russian officials, and then it turns out you met Russian officials, it's even worse.

Most of your comment is downplaying the consequences of Russian interference, which doesn't make any sense to me. I don't care if Russian interference resulted in +10% of the vote for Hillary, a foreign power screwing with our democracy is capital-B Bad, and if there was in fact coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, then it's capital-T Treason.
Whether some pizza shop was the nexus of the whole thing, I have no idea, that isn't the point.

No, it's exactly the point. It was a specific story with specific allegations which were untrue.

The rest of your comment is "something could be going on".
I like the sentiment behind this article, but simplification (like lossy compression) omits information for the cause of simplicity, leading to an incomplete understanding.

Take for example legal concepts like securities law or environmental regulation. Yes, you can "simplify" an explanation of the Securities Act or the Paris Accord enough to fit them into a tweet, but you lose information necessary to formulating a full understanding.

If you're trying to have an informed debate about policy adoption, the details matter.
A lot of people seem to be conflating the idea of explaining something to a layman, and explaining something using simple terms.
> But in practice, I guess this legacy architecture adds a nanosecond or two to a thread switch. Is that a big deal?

I would guess the total wasted time is more like 500 cycles. This won't make your game lag, but it does mean that extremely low overhead synchronous IPC can't happen on x86.
Being able to explain something in simple terms is actually REALLY difficult to do. It is a skill in itself. Someone can intuitively understand math very well, but lack the skill to explain it to someone else at all.
A lot of these systems were built such that date stamps were simple 6 character text fields within a larger ascii-based file format on computers build in the 60s and 70s or earlier.

Space (both RAM and storage) is a premium on these systems and therefore much thought is given to what you place within any given row. As a result, no one stored unix timestamps as that would have required 10 characters more per timestamp per row, which would have had other ramifications on other parts of the code and/or memory. It would have required all stored records to be re-written somehow, which depending on the available online storage may have been an impossible task in and of itself. Not to mention how one would handle the recovery of any existing backups.

Due to these complexities, most organizations settled for code that shifted the meaning of the 2 digit year by some predetermined offset.
You make much more than $130k-$160k as an engineer at Amazon, Google, and Facebook in San Francisco or Seattle. H1B salary data is salary only, but stock and cash bonus are significant on top of that. At senior level, $240k-$300k for a dev is common for any of those companies. Growth beyond "senior" level to make $100k+ more than that is also not uncommon if you're ambitious, because the large tech companies have career ladders which supports the progression.

Re: your other points.

Health care is likely on par or better in the US for engineers working at Amazon/Google/Facebook (granted, you're SOL if you lose your job, so this has value; in the USA you're entitled to buying your last job's insurance for a period of time after leaving and getting the same coverage, which is probably enough to tide you over in a hot labor market like we see now, but this may not always be the case).

Commute time varies. A software engineer in Toronto can afford to rent somewhere with a good commute, and rent is reasonable for how good of a city Toronto is (the new rent control rules seems likely to privilege current renters by having future renters subsidize artificially below market rent, so it's very possible Toronto rent will climb significantly in the future).

But even if you're paying double the rent in SF (or similar rent in Seattle), the pay still puts you ahead. If you want to buy in Toronto on a software engineer's salary somewhere with a good commute, you're already priced out unless you're looking at condos (you're on the verge of being priced out in SF too, it's Seattle which is the standout here). Hopefully that'll change with years of continued wage growth and a decline in the value of Toronto property.

That doesn't negate your very valid points re: work/life balance, inclusion, and culture (though I think the American west coast is closer to Canada than you give credit). But IMO, if you're able/willing to get one of those sorts of jobs in the US, you have more/better options than in Canada.

So then it comes down to what sort of financial/lifestyle sacrifices you're willing to make to be in Toronto and what sort of familial/cultural gains you get in the process. It's completely valid to prioritize that over money, but arguing the pay is close after factoring in cost of living is disingenuous and problematic. I hear a lot of Canadian tech employers (and, amazingly, employees) use this reasoning to justify lower salaries.
That's understandable. It still helps give context to you as a person. I understand that may be lost on someone who first meets you, and it may be too much to explain on initial context.
You seem to have missed the part when he writes about high penalization of recidivism.
So, another electron app for Desktop?
I've heard anecdotal comments on HN about how electron based apps frequently hog resources and such an overkill as a replacement for native apps. Anybody know of a dumb cross platform wrapper that does just enough HTML/JS for apps like this to work without the bloat?
The more I try to learn physics, the more I need to see the mathematics to understand the ideas. Without the math, I don't believe it is possible to break beyond the surface 'armchair' level of understanding.
Overheard on Twitter: What if... we had this one giant GoFundMe for all medical bills that everyone paid into?
You are talking about model checkers. TLA+ is not a model checker. It is a specification language, like Coq or Isabelle. It's a mathematical language for describing programs. What you do with those descriptions may include using some mechanical tools. The tools for TLA+ include a mechanical proof assistant (like Coq and Isabelle) and it also has a model checker. But you can do more with TLA+ than use the model checker (although the model checker is often the most cost-effective use).
It's fascinating to see nerds weird out over people's inability to comprehend basic probability and statistics (which the human brain is innately bad at) while displaying a complete inability to understand other people (which the human brain is innately great at). And yes, I do it too sometimes.

Stop arguing about why the average person, or even the average powerful person, ought to have an excellent understanding of these things, and start exploring why they don't. You'll come out of it more informed.
Where is this North Korea? This isn't about crime. He was a political prisoner.
I think you're confusing higher-kinded types with type classes. You're right that neither has type classes.
Previous Opterons were also MCMs with NUMA within the socket, although their performance was poor enough that many people probably never noticed they existed. If Intel makes cluster-on-die mode mandatory then they'll also have NUMA within the socket.
I'm totally perplexed at how you can appreciate something and still want to kill it.
Oklahoma just passed a ballet referendum to scale back punishments for drug related and petty crimes. The state legislature has basically overruled a clear majority of the vote at the behest of the public unions who are deeply invested in maintaining the jobs of their members and damn the cost in ruined lives.
Absolutely outrageous, and there is no free open source alternative? how is this even possible.

> Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.

Fucking "socialists". Macron need to struct down this law, this is straight out corruption, there is no other way to say it.
It seems that way, but Britain was not all in on that war. The 1770s and 1780s was definitely not a peak time for Britain. The government was having financial problems and military spending was very low. The peak for Britain was later on in the 19th century.

I think Britain could have won that war if they had really wanted to, given enough time and resources, but there was a great reluctance to spend the resources to win it, money in particular.

There was lack of will on the part of the British government combined with a low point in British military funding. The British government (Parliament, the King was a figurehead by this time) was simply unwilling to convert the country to a war footing.

The political leaders kept hoping they could win the war with a low level of military funding and save money, which was in short supply. So the war effort was underfunded and undermanned. In the end, the Whig party (who had been against the war) came to power and negotiated an end to it. Wars are expensive, and the Whigs didn't think this one was worth the expenditure.

Compare that sad performance to the Napoleonic Wars 20 years later. Britain was on full war footing and spending huge quantities of money (going deep into debt in the process) on their military. They were cranking out large numbers of ships and training large armies.

When the War of 1812 broke out, the British were uninterested in fighting it. They were busy with Napoleon at the time, and the American war was a sideshow with few resources devoted to it compared to what was being devoted to Europe. Even then, their vastly improved military and lavish spending resulted in a much better performance than the Revolutionary War.

In the end, once the Americans were tired of fighting, a peace was negotiated. The British were uninterested in keeping that war going any longer than necessary. It was costing them money and they had better fish to fry.
Does the "bloat" in Electron come from the wrapper or from the rendering engine?
"implies" and "because" are not equivalent. For example, "x is positive implies x^2 is positive" is true but "x is positive because x^2 is positive" is false.
it would be treated exactly like people want universal healthcare - everyone just accepted they deserve one, without being grateful for it. Unlike such funds GoFundMe recipients know exactly who gave them life. This is very powerful distinction.
I've gotten the "where are you from?" question a few times - I'm multiracial, so I look ethnically ambiguous and talk with a slight accent that isn't possible to place. I just answer "Boston".

If they want to drill into it more, I say "Well, my mom's from NYC, my dad is ethnically Cantonese but was born in the Philippines, and I grew up in Boston. My maternal grandfather was Irish Catholic and my grandmother was a WASP." Usually at that point their eyes start to glaze over though.
I think some people (even lots of people) are pretty bad at explaining things, even things they understand.
A CLI is the right way to interact with a keyboard in front of you at your desk.

I think the Snap interactions are at least freshly thought out for mobile. Vertical video because that's how you routinely hold a phone. Swiping from the edges of the screen as a primary interaction, etc
It's the original publishers of the information that want to set a high premium, in this case movie studios.
It isn't the for profit prisons doing things like rolling back Oklahoma's ballet referendum to ease up on crime or keeping California from even considering it. It's public unions lobbying to keep their jobs.
I write this as a vegetarian (and former vegan). Do you appreciate plants? I know I sure do. Do I still kill them? Of course.
Pony. (https://www.ponylang.org)

Actor-based programming model, where actors are Erlang-ish very lightweight green threads, running on a hardware thread per processor. Communicating by fast message passing.
The frequency response of the apple earpods are totally ok.
https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/AppleEarPods.pdf

What industry convinces you to buy things you do not need? Advertising
No, in this case they are using PhoneGap for mobile. I also think that the electron hate is overhyped. If you really don't want the overhead, use the website instead. (eg Slack)
My read on it is that is it anticipating this kind of response or reaction in advance and telling you up front "Yeah, no." It is actually pretty common for white men to come in and derail conversations in a really terrible way and make it all about their feelings. (Not all white men do this, but it is a thing and it causes a lot of problems in internet discussions.)

Though I think the way women and POC typically respond is part of the problem. They often fully cooperate with the derail by all piling on to reply to him rather than sending the message that "the entire world does not revolve around you" by refusing to let the entire discussion revolve around that one guy.
More than that, part of silicon valley's diversity is (iirc) an unusually high representation of asian men; an assumption of whiteness wouldn't get you far.
Ask HN: Is developing open source and then using it at my job wrong?
I love my job and I work for a great company, but we have some very strict internal development policies, so much so that it makes development quite slow and cumbersome, and sometimes impossible. Many requests have to be approved for very simple tasks that need to get done, and my ability to perform my job is hampered by these policies. I love my job don't get me wrong, but outside of work I have much more freedom and can produce value at a much faster rate. In fact, the approval process for using open source is much faster than building something internally.

My question is: If I were to do open source development outside of my job, would it make sense for me to then use my work for my job? Given that I go through all the proper procedures and channels of course and don't use anything proprietary that could be grounds for a lawsuit.

I have good intentions, I want to do my job as best as possible, but the restrictions inside the company are so strict that I'd be better off creating something outside and then bringing it in. Does this make sense? Could there be legal repercussions?
This is getting old, folks.
https://help.uber.com/h/24010fe7-7a67-4ee5-9938-c734000b144a
I assume this is the bit of video you're referring to?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
"Peak British Empire" was in the early 20th century - when it covered about 25% of the area of the planet and 25% of the world population.
As I suggested, it's not inherently bad but it's functioning at a scale that simply isn't replicatable by most orgs.

If you think that approach can work for you in your job and that job is not at once of the top 10 tech find? Write an experience report about how you made it work.
>The complaint goes on to allege that Alexander shared the records with Kalanick and Emil Michael, an Uber executive who was fired earlier this week. According to the complaint, the men "discussed the records among themselves and with other staff at Uber, speculating that Plaintiff had made up the brutal rape in collusion with a rival of Uber in India to undermine Uber's business."
> Assuming Trump stays for the full term (all signs point that way right now, no matter what impeachment hopes and dreams people have), four years of damage is pretty long

Bush damaged US reputation way more than Trump, USA did recover. For entrepreneurs and talents, Canada, Germany or France just can't compete, especially France with a bureaucracy that will crush one's bones.
Nord: An arctic, north-bluish color palette
This is exactly what I was looking for a few months ago. I wanted to build a voice activated gym assistant, mostly to help me track my sets, reps, and breaks. I was hoping to have it all on-device using a Raspberry Pi, but I didn't find anything great. It ended up being "easier" to use Google Cloud for speech recognition (easier in quotes, because dealing with Google's APIs is never easy).

Shelved that project while I was busy working on other things. This has me excited to give it another go!
Why would this be beneficial unless you're also paying Google to host your software?
It's not just some hard physics that have trouble with the ELI5 / "should be able to explain it" concept.

This is also true for literature, poetry, non-analytical philosophy etc. And there the challenges are not about the complexity of the subject, but about its subtlety, and how one needs historical context and/or certain life experiences (or even proclivities) to be able to grasp a particular piece of work.
A person born in Russia says something and you think it's "russian propaganda".

Mccarthy would be proud.
I'm not an anarchist myself. But what exactly do you think we have now, in many Western countries? There is more than one way to end up with a Rumsfeld or Cheney in power.
Is wireless as bad as those three?
That's his point. It's not a bad tradeoff... for Google. It might be a bad tradeoff for you, if you don't (according to his thesis) have a revolving door of mid-level engineers lacking domain knowledge and/or a large fleet of SREs.
Stevie summed it up well I just want to add as a paying user of Plaid and a beta user of Teller, they aren't even in the same league. Teller is a by far better product and developer experience.

Plaid's data is also stale, overpriced, poorly documented and often doesn't work as advertised for many banks listed as supported. Their platform has serious billing issues and documentation inconsistencies all of which we have raised with them.
Please do not build another open source Slack clone.
I love this distinction. I've heard the headline stated before, and even if not directed at me, I find the very idea irritating and even a bit offensive. It's not necessarily that I don't understand it, it's that I can't prove to you that I understand it.

Next time I see this concept in action, maybe I'll suggest alternate methods of "explaining".
Remember that repetition is the heart of learning. If you want someone to understand Relativity to the same degree Einstein understood it, you don't start with the math. You start with an analogy (which obviously doesn't match reality). Once they understand that you can add more analogies (maybe about just parts of Relativity). Eventually you build up from parts to the whole and from broad analogies to specific details. Over the years this is happening you will be gradually introducing shortcuts and jargon. But, only a master of the subject can explain a complex topic in simple terms. I can't tell you how many times my children have asked me a question about something I thought I knew, but once I started trying to explain it in terms they would understand I realized that I really didn't understand what I thought I understood. But if I spent a little bit of time reading up on the subject again then I found that I could explain it to them in such a way that they could correctly explain it back to me.
Growth in administration won't be stopped by right-wing privatization, it's a consequence of trying to make an efficient organization. "Efficiency" means firing everyone who you can measure is doing a bad job, but the administrators either are the ones measuring, or have a job that nobody understands and so can't be measured.
If you can explain something in simple terms you may not understand the complex details.

If you hold a complex idea in your head translating that into English can be difficult because part of the process is removing/altering information to fit into existing notions. That is why buzzwords are popular they can take an idea and put it in a relatable concepts for the masses.
These lectures are different from his famous Lectures on Physics. The lectures you linked to were compiled in "Character of Physical Law" and are not related to his Caltech undergraduate courses where he presented his "Lectures on Physics" content.

You link to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Character_of_Physical_Law

"Feynman Lectures on Physics" are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me...
I don't think my American friends understand how the civilized world looks at US.