skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Isn't one pretty much the other?"

In terms of the "polarization", no. Either it was mostly pre-existing and unrealized, or increased communication created the polarization. I'm saying that the communication revealed already-existing polarization rather than is creating it. Give people 1000 years ago a sudden total Facebook and I have no reason whatsoever to believe that they'd all discover their one true unity of belief; I daresay they'd find even greater polarization.

Of course it isn't 100% one or the other, and theoretically some sort of 50/50 situation could be the case, but I'm not particularly convinced the Internet is creating polarization to speak of. As I said, I think the idea that people were non-polarized and basically agreed with each other has always been false, even in something as specific as the US. Parents have voted Republican while their children have voted Democrat for a long time.

Which also means, don't expect it to stop anytime soon. Generally when people say they want the polarization to decrease, they really mean "I want everybody to acknowledge the intrinsic and obvious rightness of my position and agree to share it"; I mean, nobody who decries polarization ever seems to volunteer to switch their personal beliefs that I've seen. But it turns out that while that was always a fantasy, we can now all see up close and personal just how much that's a total fantasy that isn't going to happen.
While the raw compute performance numbers of Zen may be better than Intel, don't underestimate other economic and business factors. AMD has always played 2nd fiddle to Intel and it is hard to shake that perception. I'd love to see a major cloud provider (AWS, Google, Azure) actively buying AMD chips and making them available for compute. However, I am still a bit skeptical this is ever going to happen. There is just too much risk for a cloud provider. Intel holds market and nearly all mindshare in mainstream cloud computing.

Disclosure: $AMD shareholder
The Investor Who Took on Uber, and Silicon Valley
Very usable and intuitive, yet powerful. I love it and you have a happy, new customer. Maybe it's my inexperience with advanced tools, but this is the first time I could simply align the text inside a box horizontally and vertically without having to count pixels manually. Lucidcharts, et al, are great, too, but the monthly subscription fees is ridiculously high.

It might be hellish to implement, but it would be amazing if the Lua code and the drawing were 100% duals, and one could switch between them at will. I bet this is a common request on HN, but a dangerous one to try and satisfy, i.e., it would be difficult to implement, appreciated by only a niche customer, and not worth the effort, so please feel free to ignore it. The tool is quite awesome as it is.
my theory has always been that 95% of the issues are generated by people not _that_ motivated. Like if you get banned from twitter a couple of times then you'll just kinda give up.

Or you'll just say "twitter ain't for me, gonna go for nazi mastodon".

Infowars exists, there's always going to be a platform for these people, but it's more about making their efforts less worthwhile in other parts of the net.
If you change one element of a system and the result of that change is a sudden and significant change in system dynamics, I'd say you're splitting hairs in allocating causality.

Communications created manifested polarisation, if you will. The previous state didn't have that. Comms created the new situation.
"People are starving in Somalia"

"I think there's already a JIRA for that one."
Instead of a homeless shelter, how about more actual affordable housing? So people can get out of the shelters and off the streets.
Please write about being a woodsman somewhere and submit it. I would love to read about it
> I think as long as someone grasps the basics of high school math and has a decent working memory, they should be able to learn how to calculate anything precisely given that you break it down into simple steps. If you don't know how to do that, you have no clue what you're doing.

Well, yes, if the only goal is computation. It doesn't take many instructions at all to be Turing-complete, and then you can compute everything a Turing machine can, which is lots of things.

That said, being able to calculate something can be very meaningless. You can try to do AES[1] by hand, if you'd like; it would be frustrating and very time-consuming, and then at the end of it you'll have gained effectively no understanding of its design or structure.

Using AES as a case study as well, one could explain the basic idea of encryption to a layman without too many troubles, but I can't imagine trying to explain anything about its operation or design to a layperson in a way that would make any sense at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard#D...
As an example, there are a bunch of things that work well on microkernels on non-x86 architectures that involve splitting drivers across processes.

On Windows, a lot of the windowing system is in the kernel in win32k.sys. Microsoft didn't do this for fun -- they did it because the old way (NT3.5?) was too slow.
My guess is the title was misleading. Should be "developer", in quotes.
Bead blast? Is that a type of abrasive blasting? Why? Some kind of annealing?
I did not say that polyolefins were dangerous. But they are less biodegradable and less renewable than the trees of which paper is normally made. And while polyolefins like empty distilled water jugs are easily recycled, I very much doubt that this blend of limestone and polyolefin can be recycled by the usual curbside collectors.
They were the only one left because the two remaining competitors merged to form ... ULA.

ULA used all of their political connections to keep SpaceX out of the government launch as long as they could, to maintain their monopoly pricing.
It's a problem because universal basic income can't even remotely work mathematically and is wildly regressive. That leaves only the option of taxing the new robotic labor to offset the FICA tax losses from millions of unemployed persons at the exact time when entitlement costs are exploding upwards. There's no other means to fill in the gap that will be left in the tax revenue from any meaningful leap in automation near-term (next 10-20 years). Will those new taxes come to be, and will they make sense (ie not cause chaos and or economic disaster)? At least in the US, one would have to bet against it working out well given the extreme government dysfunction and inability to solve even simple problems; even just the odds of any such taxes getting implemented is a long shot (the Republican Party will oppose it for better or worse).
I've only seen new Unions end badly in places doing so.

Companies just move the work elsewhere. As now companies are often owned by bigger companies/have multiple operations. So it's much easier to do so.

Managers are often overworked/overpressured to perform, get by with less, competing with foreign companies with 'free' labor. And some Workers are jaded by the old Auto Factory days their parents worked. Makes for very toxic environments.
Our comments are not incompatible, I'd say, given Google's and other companies recruiting standards, the difficulty of the immigration process, there must be a huge foreign engineers survivorship bias.

Despite a not-as-good-as-the-best-US-schools CS education, they managed to make it to Google.

Similarly, assuming each country has the same distribution of talent, and that the US is able to brain-drain from the top of the stack, the foreigners coming from smaller countries will look even more competent. I know very few Danish and Finnish programmers in the US, apart from Bjarne Stroustrup, Linus Torvalds, so I'm under the impression from that sample that Danish and Finnish are amazing programmers :)
Even with "authoritarian undertones", it's never been clear to me what sort of Very Bad Things Trump might do to warrant the hysterics. What is a realistic worst-case scenario? Do we really think he's going to make himself dictator or implement some soviet-esque authoritarian government? I don't see a scenario where he does more than temporarily obstruct progress for a few years. I guess it's just odd that everyone is terrified about "authoritarianism" without starting so much as a realistic concrete scenario.
Great products are made by small teams. Adding a large amount of people to a small team does not guarantee that the product will ship faster - many times, the opposite is true.
Close, but not quite. ULA was and is capitalist.

The term "free market" originally meant "competitive market", not "unregulated market".

An unregulated market does not remain a competitive market for long. Companies merge, then use their power to control other participants in the market. An unregulated market also suffers from fraud.

We still don't have a long-term good situation with a competitive market. An unusual event happened, breaking ULA's monopoly. We're currently depending on Elon Musk's odd personality and/or the fact that he has not yet gained a monopoly.
I don't see how you get that. Slack does tons of things IRC doesn't. IRC is not a valid replacement for the entirety of slack. To choose IRC means deciding that you don't need or want the rest of slack's features.
Let me get this straight: your coworkers - Java devs in a "Java shop" - tell you that Python isn't "enterprise-ready" even though your project is written in Python and has been successfully doing whatever it does for many years. I refer to this dismissive sentiment by Java devs as "nonsense" and you interpret my comment as condescension by the Python community?

I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you friend, but you must be suffering from the Java shop version of Stockholm Syndrome.
As a former member of a union, I honestly find it odd at how many people think that unions are always good. Of the two unions I was a part of and watching what my dad went through with his Union I'm actually fairly anti-union at this point in my life. I watched a guy get fired for sexual harassment, and rehired due to pressure from the Union. I watched my father not get a manager position, because of seniority ruling, and they gave it to a guy who was fired and then unfired (thanks to the union) for having a secret nap room behind some machines.

I know unions have done a lot of great in the past, but I rarely see much good coming from them anymore. Of course this is all anecdotal, but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them in my life.
I've been using Bitwig and really like it. It still has a few bugs here and theee but I think the productivity gain over Ableton is good. I haven't come across anything Ableton does that Bitwig can't either.
Yes, it was absolutely tailored. The fact that there was no competition does not imply that it was not tailored.

Pick your favorite news story of that era. Dig deeper into it. Read the after-the-fact analyses and behind-the-scenes exposes. I guarantee you you will be shocked at the disparity between what was reported and what was most likely the truth. Yellow journalism never stopped, it just put on a suit and tie.

It is true that we get more highly-focused infotainment now, in a much more viciously competitive environment. It is not at all clear to me that the actual quality of the reporting has gone down all that much, though, on the grounds that it was nowhere near as high as the mythos says it was.
Give me 10k, and I'll refinance my mortgage, to remove the PMI I'm currently paying, and then spend an additional $150 per month on Amazon.
Ah, yes, that's perhaps a more sensible way to go about it.
Same in New Zealand.
A little more than five hours after his request, there were more than 3,600 such replies

It seems to be thousands, not millions, and I am sure he has a secretary or -- the new PC term -- administrative assistant.
The dialog has been designed in a way so that’s almost impossible to press by accident, nor programmatically.

Specially dimmed background, characteristic sound, the dialog runs on a dedicated desktop i.e. you won’t see any apps nor the start menu. Also the default button is No i.e. you can’t accidentally press Yes with enter or space keys, you have to use a mouse.
Give money to people. Let them decide. Hell, have a giant crowdfunding voting platform. Philanthro-capitalism is the absolute worst way to distribute resources. One unfathomably wealthy person is not positioned in any way to rationally or appropriately distribute resources for humanitarian concerns.
He could do worse than just giving all his money to Bill Gates. Actually, he already has done much worse, by purchasing a major newspaper that formerly occasionally published articles written in the public interest, only to turn it into the official press organ of the "intelligence" TLAs. Viewed in a certain light, of course, that wasn't so much philanthropy as CODB.
From what I hear, the state doesn't really want to bear that cost.

This is obviously premature conjecture, but the US may be unconsciously moving towards older days, when at the expense of regulation and worker rights a lot of knowledge and technological edge was accumulated.
> How is he planning to parse through millions of responses?

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Seriously though, it's going to be thousands of responses, not millions. Get 2-3 people for a day and the ideas can be collated into themes, then reported on, easily.
Not so simple. My mortgage was sold to Wells Fargo without my input. I don't want to refinance because it wouldn't make sense financially as well as it could just be sold right back to Wells Fargo.
I genuinely don't understand what's going on with the devs. Little to no outreach about upcoming features or releases. Little to no attention paid to improving the core experience. They're seemingly ignoring their core users who have been asking for basic improvements such as these for years while continually improving the Push.

FL seems to be improving at a much more rapid pace. Bitwig gives us at least a glance at what's coming.

But Ableton? It really seems like they're getting complacent. Or they're struggling. Or maybe they're saving up everything for 10 (but telling no one about it). Ugh.

If I wasn't such a fan of the workflow I'd jump ship.
I'm not sure about this. Trees are sustainable and renewable. Rocks are not. This is why mining can be so devastating to an area
But I'd say in return that's a serious goal-post hike. When people write these sorts of articles and decry modern social media for "polarization", they are clearly claiming that it is creating it where it didn't exist before. It is a totally different problem if it is revealing something that has always existed in a way that is harder to ignore. The moral responsibility for Facebook et al creating polarization is much greater than for Facebook discovering the already-existing polarization.

Also, if one believes this is a problem to be solved, the solutions for "Facebook is creating polarization" and "Facebook is revealing already-existing polarization" are totally different. And wildly different in feasibility. There are absolutely real differences that emerge from the two possibilities. One situation could be solved by just basically shutting down the social Internet, albeit at great cost. (And other possibilities, but all at great cost.) The other... well... there hasn't been a lot of success at fundamentally changing human nature, and most serious attempts lately have caused more problems than they've solved.
Philanthropy has a net benefit to the world if it can re-allocate labor, capital allocated to unproductive activities to activities which are perceived to improve the human experience.

If the philanthropy is spent on re-allocating labor, capital allocated to existing productive activities (e.g. rice farming, bridge maintenance), to activities which are perceived to improve the human experience, there's a big chance it would cause harm to society instead.
For all we know, Signal itself could be one big CIA operation. It wouldn't be beyond their capabilities. But at least the protocol and encryption are open source.
I realize you weren't talking about 0-60 time, it was an analogy I introduced. Not meant to be technically similar, only a similar fraction of the whole. I think "driv[ing] in a straight line at 60mph" is a smaller fraction of car performance than frequency response of headphone performance, and 0-60 time more similar.
I believe that traditionally this concept of funding things in the public's interest is called taxes + democracy.
Chinese scientists test quantum entanglement over unprecedented distance
That's cool,I've never been a contractor. Just always seem to end up cleaning up after old messes.
Private prisons and the incentive for profit is a concern. What is more of a concern, and what leads to much more incarceration is the ambition of prosecutors to rack up convictions, and the embarrassment that is caused if someone discovers a conviction overturned. That's inventive to keep people in prison and don't bother asking if maybe you've got the wrong guy (that's the defense's problem). Also, in many municipalities, the public defenders are very lightly funded, to the degree where one defender works 100 cases at at time. It is in no way a fair trial in any resemblance to what the constitution envisioned.

That's the corruption, that's the stink in the system.
Why do you think that? http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do seems to be doing just that and has pretty good results.
> Contractors never say no. It's not their fault. They're not paid to say no.

I'm a contractor, working for a consulting firm, and we say no all the time. Sometimes it's not a hard no, but more of a gentle nudge in a better direction. But we often advise our clients away from certain requests because that's what we're paid for. We're the experts and they value our expertise, that's why they hired us.

I know for a fact that what you describe exists, because about a quarter of our jobs involve cleaning up after someone like that, but I wouldn't say it's a feature of contractors in general but of cheap contractors.
I think the base economic theory is that companies will pay for labor exactly what that labor is worth to them. Analogous to the concepts of full-time and part-time employment, is the concept of full-coverage pay or partial coverage where the government picks up the rest.

The problem I have with the system is that everyone who is actually paying receives the least benefits. It's just wealth redistribution. But inevitably it also disincentives work the more the subsides increase in value, and the sharper the drop-off as additional work is performed.

So how do you structure a system which encourages work? The obvious solution is that benefits should increase as tax payments increase. The makes working super-incentivized, and provides a massive boost to productivity.

Aside from technology improvements, which the economists tell us aren't really providing bang for the buck anymore, increasing the size of the workforce increases GDP growth.
US Senate bill on “any digital exchanger or tumbler of digital currency”
Note that the article make no claim to be determining which headphones "sound better when stuck in human hears listening to music". And the article draws some specific conclusions and points out some of it's known limitations.

Humour me - what are some/any of the "bunch of things that should be measured" that were not, for a study titled "No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price"?

I notice they also failed to test for "soundstage" "musicality" "warmth", or waterproofness, taste, and availability in a range of colours to suit your decor. Another "bunch of things" they didnt set out to test nor made any claims about.
Indeed. I worked for a pharmaceutical company in 1989. The person I car pooled with worked in the "plant health" department. They had either weekly or fortnightly blood draws (memory fails) and any significant amount of nasty shit in their blood would prompt investigation at the least. When she disclosed her pregnancy to management, she was immediately moved out of lab work until she was no longer breastfeeding.

So, it is possible to manage these kind of work environments safely, it's a deliberate choice to not care. Or a cultural decision that says that such things only matter for the highly paid PhDs in the lab, not for the replaceable blue collar workers.
France is a pretty big country, and their talent seems way over represented compared to that of some of France's neighbors.
The US extends sex trafficking laws outside the country. Why not other laws?
I expected this to be using "catfish" in the same sense as the online dating world; i.e. the "catfish programmer" is one who puts all sorts of programming languages on their resume but can't actually answer any questions about what they've done in that language.
Having a PMI means you're living beyond your means already.
Unions aren't bad in itself. They largely solve the power asymmetry that exists between larger companies and their employees. Its only that at a certain point unions get so big there's actually a power asymmetry the other way: unions can strongarm the companies. How to restore the balance? I have no idea.
It is possible that some where in the world people do that.
Lumber is worth far more money than paper, especially in our current economy. Growing trees for paper in a forest rich area like western Canada is more effort than it's worth and more expensive.
Does that price include oxygen? Not all of them do [0].

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/13/f35_pilots_report_h...
Shocker, eh?
That was fascinating! Thank you for sharing the link.
In addition to the other answers you've gotten, it's often the case that:
(a) Developing what you need as a modest extension to existing OSS is cheaper than doing it all by yourself; and
(b) Contributing those changes back to the community means that you've shed the burden of having to keep your local patch's changes in sync with the OSS version going forward.

("Hey, we wanted to use MAAS to maintain our cluster, but it doesn't support our particular power controller, so let's send the patch upstream...")
Yup, the shit wood gets put into pulp, the good stuff gets sawn out for lumber or veneer logs.

Hardwood pulp is just barely worth more than the stumpage fees that the loggers must pay to the landowners. Depending on the market, softwood pulp can be even less profitable.
This is terrible. All the more because the chips are incredibly important, both for the manufacturers and us consumers.

Same goes with Solar panels. An acquaintance with chemical engineering degree worked in the industry and he said it's so ironic that the ingredients for manufacturing solar panels are so incredibly toxic when the goal of having solar panels is to reduce pollution caused by fossil burning power plants.
Living in Washington State, I've watched the Machinist Union almost cause Boeing to completely leave the state of Washington, and even though Boeing stayed, they moved a lot of their work to other plants. So yes it is a very dangerous game.
I wouldn't be so sure. As Intel's customers, the cloud providers are very interested in not seeing Intel maintain the near-monopoly they have inched toward over the last 5 years. They don't want to pay $7K each for the highest performance Xeon if it could be $6K in a slightly more competitive market. So much so that Google and others joined the OpenPOWER Foundation. Whether that was just for signaling alone, or if they legitimately thought a POWER8 chip would come available that met their needs, I of course do not know.
I think the automation of middle management positions will eliminate these archaic modes of thinking.
I am from western Canada, I guess it is not the same every where.
Unions are bad for business. I am happy they killed it.
I imagine in those types of restaurants, menus might be cycled-out due to wear and tear more often than due to changing dishes. In which case, the increased durability and water-resistance of this stone-based paper might result in less waste.