skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By "books as books," yes, I mean the print editions. The first edition of HtDP specifically since that is the one I own. By "typesetting" I mean the entire process of producing a physical artifact from an edited manuscript. Thus, I am including aesthetic considerations such as typography, cover design, and binding.

TeX is a technology. In the context of my literary criticism, citing TeX and MIT press is analogous to "styled with CSS and hosted on GoDaddy" in regards to a website. TeX is a tool. MIT Press is a good publishing house and its catalog contains quality, but some of its books are still better than others in terms of typesetting (in the sense described). The differences can reflect authors' goals; publishing economics; and just the times (HtDP came about in the era of the commercial web).

Personally, I find the unconventional physical format of HtDP (8" x 9") awkward. It's unbalanced. The pages are too wide. The compensating increase in font size makes the lines so tall that there is low information density on each page. As a reader, the amount of head/eye movement for a disrupts my concentration. The gutters are far too wide.
I suppose that the wide gutters were to accommodate the Lambda icon, but these peter out in the first quarter of the book. Because these could be taken away with little effect their inclusion is a decision that could have been revisited and a more conventional layout considered.

The typography is haphazard. Code on page 191 uses san-serif. Code on page 322 is set in four faces; a mix of serif and san-serif, bold, and italics; and boxes. Page 299 has its own notation. Often its complexity obscures the big ideas: on page 278 the unimportant ideas are in bold (local is irrelevant to the local point of f's referent) [1] and the diagram's arrows connect the thinnest term and the thinnest term is typeset in italic.

Please don't take my remarks personally except in so far as I think HtDP is a book worth owning and reading and that the world is better for it existing in its current form. It's useful and supports an important project that I like. Thanks.

[1] Page 279 uses nested boxes to express locality. These have semantics distinct from boxes on page 322.
Yikes! That's awfully close to IX!
Unratified Amendments to the U.S. Constitution
Grammar checkers do not work [pdf]
You raise an important point. I think there's a big distinction to be drawn between people's feelings and actual business needs.

People everywhere like feelings of control. And the more layers of management a company has, the more executive feelings come to predominate over on-the-ground business facts. But in practice, bureaucratic change-control processes don't actually produce better code or safer systems. In my experience, they make things worse, because large batches and slow feedback loops make bugs easy to add and hard to find.

One good next step after the middle ground you describe is continuous deployment of code, but using feature flags and A/B testing tools to control visibility and impact of features. As you say, if you give people some big, obvious controls, they feel in control. Decoupling code release with business impact lets me get on with what I care about. And it lets them learn to be bolder, more engaged in the process of delivering value to users.
Ask HN: How to start hacking photonics?
Hey,
I've bought a bunch of books on photonics and what not, kinda went through them but my hands are itching to start hacking on something.

I'm not sure what I'm really looking for, I guess a photonics experiment kit? When I googled around, I did find some things but the cheaper ones were of questionable utility and the more expensive ones were pretty expensive (~$10K+) and only of marginally less questionable utility.

I realize that photonics isn't programming, however I'm wondering if there's something like this.
I am all for using a better password manager. In fact, with PfP: Pain-free Passwords I developed one myself - and I invested much thought into making sure the master password cannot realistically be guessed unless it is absolutely trivial. However, most people will go with whatever is built in. So no excuses for browser makers to offer something that has been known to be very suboptimal for at least nine years.
Ya I used to pull an all nighter once a week. It has a lot of long term deleterious effects but it does the trick for a day break from depression.
Your fedora is tipped automatically.
He could have just lied after the facts, and either way these things are not mutually exclusive.
It’s an extremely interesting field where decieses act in extraordinarily ways. An ex boyfriend of my best friend got an autoimmune response and went from perfectly healthy to lying in a respirator close to death in one week, only to be fully out of the hospital two weeks later. And as it went on the doctors seemed to have next to no clue about what was happening just saying that he needed to “ride it out”. Another close friend had an autoimmune condition where she woke up one day partially blind on one eye. It looked like her body was attacking her own eye. But today there is no issue anymore. I think that for anyone who’s come across the subject it’s just intensely interesting.
The answer might actually be “communism”. Central to that ideology was a democratic element, where certain groups (workers of one factory, say) would elect delegations to similar groups one level up, in a sort of pyramid. This would repeat all the way to the general committee of the party. “General Secretary” is a title that pretty clearly denotes a certain lack of power: compare the UN, where the top post is named the same, very deliberately indicating their rather beaurocratic leadership function, clearly subordinate to the Presidents and Prime Ministers selecting them.

Now, obviously no communist country ever came close to actual communism. But still: if you spend an inordinate amount of the state’s resources on indoctrination, you will at some point raise a new generation of leaders that cannot completely shake these stories they were told (and forced to repeat) during their rise through the ranks. In such a way, lip service becomes service. These leaders have also risen through the ranks of hundreds such committees with their endless late-night cigar-smoking and scheming. Anyone too daring, or too easily bored, will drop out of the competition long before they get to the actual levers of power. That’s why you get uninspiring beaurocrats, and the colorful cool dictators like Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein only ever get to power in their respective “lesser banana republics”
It's a bad idea to use multiple env in the same AWS account.
That being said, there is something for the pressure cooker environment that forces you to consider and learn the hard topics. I have gone back to school twice as an adult, first for a pure math degree, and now for comp sci - machine learning. Both times, the amount of pain it takes is just not something a person with average or above average motivation would go through on their own.
Are there any other platforms that one can learn, that are perhaps not as well known as Eth, but also don't have Eth's problems?
Their reason for multiple accounts seems to be due to API rate limiting imposed by aws? At least thats my understanding.
In which case that sounds like market failure to me, which is another excellent time for regulation. We do this all the time with other "natural monopolies".
A chapter zero is a great idea, just less exciting to write so the current one is what got priority ;)

I echo your sentiments, in the README.md in the root i talk about how writing tests is how I generally try and solidify knowledge.

I watched a few videos from a Coursera course called "learning how to learn" (or something like that) and it talked about how making your own analogies and examples helps you memorise stuff. To me, this style of learning works along those lines.
Rule 19 reads:

> 19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

The rule means basically what you said. "To get characters into trouble" means basically the first third of a movie or so, or the point in the movie that "kicks the action off". So I'm not sure what in that rule can be reasonably disagreed with.
It sounds like you're trying to tell the market what it should and should not buy. That's not how it works. The market tells you what it has chosen, then you can choose your reaction to it. Your reaction seems to be "disapproval"? Well that's mildly interesting I guess.

Saying "they're missing the mark on marketing" about the second-largest crypto by market-cap, and surely top-5 in terms of ongoing development is at the very least a bit ironic. They exactly did NOT miss the mark on marketing. There are other technically superior products that don't get nearly as much funding, public attention, development resources etc.
> If he had actual journalistic integrity he would have written a piece about how hard it can be to actually unplug detailing his own failed attempt.

This would be a really interesting piece. He could talk about the pressures, both generic and journalism-specific, that make it difficult to let your Twitter feed go dormant. And he could talk about any other challenges/failures that he experienced, and why.
The first result on Google search points to Ikea Marjun curtains, I bought those when I lived in Berlin and I guarantee you that it was impossible to get my bedroom really dark.

On the other hand with proper outdoor shutters or roller blinds[0] you can easily get a room pitch-black.

[0] https://www.schenk-sonnenschutztechnik.de/uploads/tx_frsuper...
What Is Penetration Testing?
I guess I'm similar in that I left high school with very little mathematical knowledge. I've struggled with many many maths books over the years which usually assume you have a certain background, or don't explain things very well, or only explain things using notation which they don't explain.

The books that helped me the most are "Mastering Mathematics", and "Mastering Advanced Pure Mathematics" both by Geoff Buckwell. They will take you through UK GCSE and A-Level maths, from nothing to calculus. They have plenty of examples and exercises to work through. Just start at the beginning and work through them.

They are based on a UK curriculum though, so that may or may not be what you want.
Obama can blame Republicans all he wants, but the reason Democrats lost their majorities and Obama lost the confidence of his voters is that they chose to stand squarely on the side of banks and big business in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, rather than that of the people who were victimized.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but that's not really pretty surprising. Merely typesetting a book in TeX does not guarantee good typesetting. TeX is just a program that makes it possible to typeset like “real books”; one still needs to know (and care) enough about book design (as Knuth did) to actually produce something aesthetically pleasing. (For an extreme example: if you just run TeX and don't pay attention to the warnings, you'll have plenty of underfull or even overfull lines, resulting in even worse typesetting than you'd get from something like Microsoft Word.) The standard LaTeX classes also make some poor typographic choices, because Lamport unlike Knuth was more interested in logical/structured markup than typesetting.

Nor does being published by a reputed publisher guarantee good typesetting. The story of TeX is itself a good example: TeX came into existence because Addison-Wesley, whom Knuth had chosen specifically for their great typesetting, was compromising on their typesetting for the 2nd edition of TAOCP vol 2 as they moved away from hot-metal typesetting. I'd expect that things are even worse today.

In the case of HtDP specifically, just opening the print edition of the book and flipping through the pages, I can see how its typesetting is indeed below average for a textbook. Look at the ugly table on page 21 (and throughout the book), the uneven typographic “color” on pages like 23 and 31, and just the whole mishmash of mismatched fonts on most pages. The book also has a lot of short paragraphs (two or three lines long), so the choice of indentation for paragraphs in the book is an odd one. A good book designer would have changed a lot of this.

Overall it's perfectly readable, and sure, all typographic subtleties fade away once a reader gets sufficiently engrossed in the content (which is what ultimately matters), but the book is not a delight to hold in one's hands even before that, as in the case of TAOCP. (Probably unfair to compare with something well above average (TAOCP), so compare with SICP which is probably at about the average for a textbook from MIT Press.)
How are you liking your XPS?
OP here. Sorry if I misunderstood the guidelines, but these are not the same stories. The proposal to scrap the term limits was announced two weeks ago, which is what those stories talk about. This new story is about the proposal having been approved by the parliament (a couple hours ago). Though I suppose there was little chance of it not passing, I did think it's a historic vote, so I thought I'd post this as well.
That was self directed sarcasm (unless my sarcasm detector is broken)
Recommend a programming book for 7yo autistic savant
he loves minecraft, black holes and i am told reads at college level. I was thinking a 3D game physics programming book, but in an approachable language with low starting friction like Python?
Will the Future Be Human? – World Economic Forum
I'd say the most basic advantages a web app has for a user are no install, cross platform support and same look and feel across those platforms. These advantages may not seem all that important to the technically inclined but they are massive.

From the producer side: web applications are faster to prototype, develop, publish and monetize than desktop applications. This is also a massive advantage for the average application, cost wins.

The main advantages a native desktop application still has are performance, native look & feel and native feature support.

Purists will argue these native features are super important (they are in particular cases), meanwhile economics will keep pushing towards more web and electron apps. Such is life.
Singlepoint Launches Bitcoin Payment Solution for Cannabis Industry
http://archive.is/KA3Cq - Mirror that you can see.
I'm a longtime Kinesis user and I had the pedals about 15 years back but I never made much use of them.

I don't know if the Kinesis reduces the finger movement between rows, but your hands definitely sit in a much more relaxed way. The thumb has quite a bit more responsibility too and you don't do any stretch moves like using the pinky for the twiddle or a lot of control pressing. Love the keyboards.

As for the pedals, they are programmable and the general thinking was control/option/alt type configurations for them. I just never got in to heal-toe typing, the pedals got dusty and I never really used them much. Had I actually had CT or something, I think I might have been more motivated to make use of them.
Came here to recommend this one as well. I bought it several years ago as an adult trying to revisit math. I'm always surprised at how few people know of this gem.
There's so many claims for sleep being very beneficial, that I'd approach sleep deprivation very carefully. I wonder if there are different types of depression that are amenable to different treatments.
What's your use case for incremental materialized view refresh? Are you using materialized views within a single database/instance, or across links between databases?
MNIST training: Showdown between JavaScript and WebAssembly
Who is bewildered by a default setup, though? I think this is a ridiculously implausible straw man.
Does your code stand up to scrutiny?
It is recommended to use multiple accounts for isolation. AWS has recently launched Organizations to make creation and management of multiple accounts simple. See https://aws.amazon.com/organizations

Tools like aws-vault and now aws-okta make securing credentials a piece of cake.
Waves platform, NEM, NEO, many others.
Replacing (or at least partially re-capturing a part of) Ethereum's success is one of the next big things that many projects are trying to do. It became clear that some form of smart contracts are considered very valuable by the market, at least ICOs - and it's clear that a platform that will win in this regard will become Huuge. There are also clear disadvantages that Ethereum has, so this is an obvious vacuum that many projects are trying to fill.
Doh! On re-reading, I think you're right, but it zoomed right over my head...
That would still be an authentication token, just placed somewhere else in the request.
Yes, the design review process in Amazon is good. I'd love to know how other big companies do this.
How Amazon built the Echo Spot alarm clock
So the argument comes down to "if we can't stop criminals from using it, it should be illegal"?

That seems pretty weak...
I'm afraid history will not judge him kindly. Well intentioned perhaps, but largely inneffective.
I'd much rather have an illicit miner on my system than any other kind of malware/rootkit. At least the miner has an incentive to not do bad things to my system and data, and leave the network mostly unused to avoid detection.

On the other hand, mining still takes a lot of energy and drives up GPU costs ...
> People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength.

The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion.

So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion.

An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.
They are fairly common throughout most of Central Europe. I stayed in apartment a few years ago that had electric shutters; it felt like I was living on a space ship.
You're reading it backwards. The point being made is "never get your characters out of trouble by coincidence", not "always get your characters into trouble by coincidence".
In practice, cramming all this into the same account doesn't work. Segment is following best practice here.

For example, IAM doesn't provide the granularity in resources and conditions that you'd want to effectively isolate the blast radius of developer keys. ec2:TerminateInstances didn't (doesn't?) support VPC level conditions, so being able to terminate one instance meant you could terminate all instances.

Similarly, you might want your engineering team to iam:PutUserPolicy in development, but have a much more restricted group in production which isn't possible with IAM today.

I've taken this pretty far in the past to attempt segmenting within one account, but always run into limits: https://github.com/witoff/self-service-iam
What is MICMAM?

Whitepapers, lectures, and speech transcriptions are also good motivation, and useful resources. Sometimes overwhelming, especially if reading mathematical text is as a foreign language. And sometimes it takes you down a rabbit hole.

My biggest block for learning math has really been all the unlearning. After a while ideas like negative numbers and zeros and processes like addition and subtraction stop making as much sense as I thought.

Here is my favorite rabbit hole:

http://www.turingarchive.org/viewer/?id=465&title=01

leads to:

http://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/img/?PID=GDZPPN002278499...

leads to:

http://www.jamesrmeyer.com/pdfs/godel-original-english.pdf

Where to go from there - philosophy or computation? Lambda calculus is only a couple clicks away. Lisp papers, perhaps?
for having a http-only website?
Consider building sites with WordPress. Does anything in the past compares ?
I added a real blackout curtain to my room and really noticed a difference in the quality of my sleep and my general mood. It was designed to really black out all light... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZJ88DY/
European shutters are pretty nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KePLmie7lE
Slingshot malware spread widely, undetected for six years
Virtue signaling is what the kids are calling it these days I believe.
I've been eyeballing a Kinesis for a while, but am curious to know what kind of mouse or trackpad you use alongside it — especially if it's something particularly ergonomic, a vertical mouse, etc. I remember seeing someone mount a Magic Trackpad on the blank spot in the middle of the keyboard but am curious what normal mouse usage looks like with one.
Interesting article. I've been offline for a long time too. There are 2 components to this problem: One is the inherent "disconnected-ness" of reality without the internet (which is both good and bad, depending on the occasion) and the other is that you're going against the flow.

Sure, it was harder to meet new people and communicate 20 years ago, but there was the intent, the understanding and the social norms required for it. People were more talkative. You could drop by somebody's house like it's no big deal. You could call people to chat and catch up. Other people were looking to communicate offline too. Now that just doesn't happen. Unless you manage to find a core/community of people willing to stay offline, disconnecting from the internet just disconnects you from society to a large extent.

What would be ideal, is to "disconnect" from the bad influences of the internet. Had a better, non-addictive, non-brainwashing version of facebook/twitter existed, more people would like to connect and stay connected, feel better about it, and better, more meaningful relationships would form.
>Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go” and take them home with them on the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free food.

company made mistake and self-corrected. A stage in the lifecycle where company has already got bean counters who can't see beyond a penny in front of their nose (food, even with "to go" is such a penny expense, especially compare with the hit such change took upon the engineers' morale), yet still had the ability to self-correct. From what i hear today they have reached the stage where bean counters have overtook and the ability to self-correct is pretty much gone.
Is there any indication that he was “being paid to plug paper-news” or is this just your conspiracy theory?

Because if it’s the latter, it’s a decidedly lame conspiracy. And considering the financial pressures, I’m not even sure if the New York Times could afford to bribe someone writing for the New York Times.
Light does not happen by magic and tends to not occur alone. I would be very leery of asserting cause and effect here.