skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit unconventional, but I like taking "analog" notes via GoodNotes and an Apple Pencil. Can't search them, but much more conducive to brainstorming—and you get a cute PDF notebook of all your thoughts at the end of a project. More here: http://archagon.net/blog/2016/08/30/goodnotes-and-the-joys-o...

If it's knowledge I want to aggregate or reference later, I use OneNote.
My friend (PhD in Physics) runs a small hedge fund in Chicago. A team of about 6 traders and quants. They have been doing all their fairly sophisticated quantitative models in Fortran for the past 15 years.

He is currently learning R, though, and so Fortran at this shop may have its days numbered.
7 Low-Investment Ideas for Online Business
If a drug patent hasn't passed phase 3 trials isn't it just an idea?
There are definitely hotkeys that allow you to do anything via keyboard; your friend just didn't know them. If they had searched, they would have found the help page https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204434 "Mac accessibility shortcuts". For example, the global hotkey Control-F7 toggles the above-described "All controls" navigation setting, and Control-F2 switches focus to the menu.
That's a case of the pot calling the kettle black if I've ever seen one.
It reminds me of one person here on HN describing their interaction with Google w.r.t. their startup's novel idea.
Spotify starts to compete with music labels with direct deals with artists
Software usually provides a unique service, so typically you'll want to charge for the service based on the value of your service's differentiator. But the exact pricing scheme will vary by industry/vertical. Some software may be priced by usage, some by subscription tier, some by seats or licenses. Pricing is usually the last thing developers want to think about because the best pricing is often counter-intuitive and tightly coupled to the customer's needs and mindset. Enterprises, for instance, understand seats and licenses because they've been buying software that way for 30 years. The subscription model we're focused on now is a recent development (last 10 years). Selling seats, licenses, copies etc is a sales tactic, not an engineering decision. That concept is changing but will only change as fast as the slowest megacorps. I'd say consumers are similar in that they're used to purchasing "copies" of retail goods at the store, so it's familiar to them. Trying to sell in an unfamiliar way usually fails. Why put that obstacle in front of yourself?

Personally, I put a lot of effort into my software and want to get as much as possible in return so I can be financially independent ASAP and enjoy family, nature, and hobbies to their fullest.

I think the bugs are all at my house, by the way ;)
This kind of interface was common in fortran 77. I’m guessing you’ve used BLAS/LAPACK? In more modern fortran, it’s not so usual. Also, Fortran is much more high level than C, and how memory is allocated etc is compiler dependent to a much larger degree than for C.

I’d recommend writing a Fortran 95 wrapper which creates work arrays for you if you really need to use such routines.
Ive been very intrigued by Kotlin. As a language it's nicer than either Ruby or Python. Don't be turned away by the fact that it runs on JVM, there will be a native, LLVM based backend. The killer feature is that you can transpile Kotlin to JS so you can write your backend and front end in one language. You can also integrate with all the front end frameworks. Here's an official sample app based on React
https://github.com/JetBrains/create-react-kotlin-app

Another nice thing is that you have a good IDE for Kotlin. Kotlin is by JetBrains, the same people that built PyCharm and IntelliJ.
Mind sharing which blogs and newsletters?
This just seems like an incorrect analysis, not a limit of rationality. Dosage matters. Dosage specifies a quantity and a time frame. One donut per day is fine. Five donuts is not.
> In my personal life...that sounds like a stressor that I'd be willing to pay money to avoid.

Exactly, and a single citizen typically doesn't have the means to commission a software project, or even non-trivial fixes to an existing software project.
It works in significantly different manner, there is no JIT, but TIMI gets AOT compiled into native(-ish) code (that is in turn cached in persistent storage) transparently by OS/400 when first run. But the process is hidden and fast enough to look like some kind of JIT VM.
If you don't have anything to add to the discussion, use upvotes/downvotes. Responding with comments like this just makes you look like you're just a sock puppet, which you probably don't want.
Depends on the individual I guess. :)

Years ago, I went through a phase getting the installer working well (cross platform) for a PostgreSQL replication project. FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, RHEL, ... there might have been others too, it was a long time ago. ;)
Write your own Python bindings
ماه7
Hi jclos, yeah I think with just audio that we are just missing so much information and it kind of detaches us and makes it harder to retain information. Context is really everything with building memories, which is why I try to pack the flashcards full of as much context as possible on Seedlang. Not just video, but also the context of story, and even the context of grammar as you click through the subtitles of the video.

But back on the topic of video vs audio, have you heard of the McGurk Effect? If not, Google it and watch a youtube video where they demonstrate it. It shows how that the sounds we hear are actually hugely affected by what shapes that are made from lips. So the same sound will be heard differently just based on differing lip shape, it will blow your mind.
Ask HN: What combination of tools do you use to track your day?
I know this is not a novel question. But I am thinking of tools that collect data that can be exported and combined together to give a complete picture of how my day was spent. Are there any set of tools you use that are more powerful as a combination than individually?
How summit talks may affect North Korean hacking
"This sweepstakes is only available for residents of USA, Canada (excluding Quebec), UK, France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Mainland China and Taiwan."
"The biggest problem is that multibyte arithmetic has to be processed in LSB to MSB order, with the carry propagating from one byte to the next; but on the 6502 it's so much easier to count down than it is to count up..."

Not that I've tried this (haven't programmed in 6502 assembly in 30+ years now) but doesn't that suggest he should order the bytes in the opposite direction? (ie, if I'm understanding correctly, he's using little-endian now but his comments make me wonder if big-endian might be more efficient on 6502.)
> If the leaker had any bit of sense, (s)he would've copied everything first.

One assumes so, but it's hard to know the specifics here; if it was on some sort of proprietary forum, there might not have been an easy mass-download option. Maybe there was some sort of credits system. Maybe it was on a tenuous internet connection. If was a private torrent site -- the article's not clear but does mention bittorrent -- none of these restrictions would be that unusual.
I must agree. They don't make it clear that it shouldn't be used for secure computing(cryptography) purposes. They compare chacha20 and mersene twister in the same table,isn't it obvious that chacha20 isn't ideal for non-crypto use?
To name a few, I’m glad to use and pay for: Overcast, Feedblitz, Discourse, Zapier, Dropbox, Roon, WavePad, Bench, Nisus, Zoom, Slack, SuperDuper, Mailchimp, Hover, TypeExpander, Tidal.

Those are services, not standalone software. (Tidal may be standalone, but it's from 1979.)

It's not like people are still buying Walter Bright's C++ compiler.
You always depend on an untested hypotheses at some point. They are absolutely unavoidable.

Here's a very simple example:

- How much testing is sufficient? For example, as far as we can tell the laws of physics don't vary over time scales that we can directly observe. This has been true as far as we can tell.

- So far so good: the hypothesis that 'the laws of physics don't change' has been 'tested'. Next question: is that amount of testing sufficient?

- Well, that seems to be an untestable proposition; it's always philosophically possible that things get pulled out from under your feet, and no amount of testing up to time T lets you know with complete certainty what happens for t > T.

Go even one or two steps deeper, and you quickly find yourself resting on either unfounded, untested, or untestable assumptions.
It's interesting that while the bookies unanimously have Brazil as favourites [0], this stock market game has Germany ahead of them [1]. It might be because Germany has easier opponents in the group stage.

[0] https://www.oddschecker.com/football/world-cup/winner

[1] https://prediction.zone/stockmarket2/worldcup2018/trading
Fair point , thank you for the feedback. As I wrote, I did not detect causation (except for a couple of examples in which the null hypothesis of Granger causality test was rejected). The aim of the analysis was to find relationships between data from Hacker News and Stack Overflow without verification of other data sources , which could influence both websites.

Nor did I say I had found causation neither did write that I had not. I specifically stated that I tested the hypothesis of Granger causality which does not mean causality. Even if the main question of the article was causality, I could not answer it (and I stated this in the text).

Nevertheless, I agree that I should have probably been more careful with the term "causality" so thank you once again for pointing this out.
>With the exception of the handicapped, people don't really need cars.

What country do you live in? We don't all live in downtown SF. In fact, most of us don't. We live outside the city and drive 20 miles to get to work (you're nuts if you think most people are going to spend hours commuting 60 miles on a bicycle every day). And there are no bike Lanes, let alone paths
And it snows.

>There's really no valid reason to use a car unless you're an invalid.

You're on another planet. It's interesting that you talk about finding practical soltutions to "real problems" yet seem to lack any notion of what the real problems are.
can confirm. taking my nap now, in fact!
Yes, I’ve driven them. Given personal experience and Elon’s claims of drivers using autopilot with hands off the wheels, I believe you’re incorrect.

To be clear, when I say the software should be changed to not automatically steer, I don’t mean that it should more aggressively complain about hands off the wheel. I mean that the car should drive in a straight line with hands off the wheel, and it should also alert the driver if it thinks that the driver is leaving the lane.
I agree with what you mean.

But do you read all the medical literature before going to a doctor when something just feels weird?

Or, somewhat differently, do you read the source code of all packages on your computer to ensure there is no malware?

I'm a universalist as much as I can, but there's a reason specialization, division of labor, results in productivity increase. Somewhat funny that Kant himself also argued for division of labour, just a year after publishing the Enlightenment article, [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour#Immanuel_Ka...
> Blackface isn't necessarily racist.

I remember the controversy of blackface being used in Tropic Thunder. I think you’re right that the intention behind it matters.
Very related: about a year ago, I wrote about weaknesses of neural networks specifically: https://matt.life/papers/security_privacy_neural_networks.pd...

With powerful machine learning systems, we need to think about security a little differently. See especially the section 4.8 about function approximation:

> Given a task for which no discrete algorithm
is known to solve, there is a good chance a neural network can at least approximate it. The extreme value of neural networks are their ability, in many cases, to act as an unknown function that can map inputs to outputs with good enough generalization almost as if the actual function was known. This makes any system that relies on the difficulty of implementing an unknown function vulnerable to the malignant use of neural networks
Looks like a great idea and after using duolingo to brush up on my Spanish I think you are right about trying another format.

I will leave a comment about the website: on my IPhone, the edges of the centered text are cut off, it seems like it needs to resized for mobile in my case.
> When someone is building a product without a business goal focused on pleasing someone else, they are far more likely to be either passive in waiting for people to report things on mailing lists or to be actively annoyed with the reports and to occasionally express that frustration in a way that belittles users.

This seems (to me) like a cultural thing. In this instance, by "cultural" I'm meaning it depends on the culture of the Open Source project.

Many projects do seem to have developers that aren't really hmm... "user friendly" might be correct description. But not ever project is like that.

The PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DB Browser for SQLite Communities are all pretty user friendly.

As in, it's pretty rare to see a display of bad attitude towards someone reporting a bug, asking a simple question, or doing pretty much anything else in good faith.
> standards compliance that won the browser war, not Microsoft's extensions

OMG, what about the whole antitrust case of the USA against Microsoft in the 2000ies?

I can't read any other paragraph written by "journalists" like those.
3 Methods for Back Pain Relief
>>> College is definitely the most typical paths but there are still paths for humble people willing to start that the bottom and work hard. College just isn't an option for everyone unfortunately.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. I will just make a cultural parenthesis on that last sentence.

In the USA, degrees are expensive, the only reason they are not for everyone. It limits the supply of degrees and make them more valuable.

In other parts of the world, mostly thinking of western Europe here, higher education is free or affordable. Degrees are much more common and of higher level, while the job market is pretty bad. It's really shooting oneself in the foot not to get one.
This logic is flawed. FOSS software doesn't need to equal software that no one pays for. You want to support FOSS development? There are tons of projects which take financial support, feel free to contribute. You can also support companies which directly work on developing FOSS.
If you go to sleep at 4pm and wake up at midnight, does that count as 16 hours of sleep or zero? This system suffers from the reverse Gremlins problem.
Saving flood water to get through the droughts
They are built and sold in the similar sense as above mentioned AS/400 is built and sold. The user-visible CPU architecture is from the start designed as VM abstraction provided by the OS, which itself runs on real hardware that does not necessarily use same instruction set. Thus the today's hardware is something essentially off-the shelf (x86 in the unisys case, power for as/400).

On the other hand S/360 ("the mainframe") compatible hardware is still being manufactured by IBM and AFAIK even Fujitsu (which in addition to being S/360-compatible mainframe supplier themselves also bough Amdahl, which was the original IBM-compatible mainframe manufacturer, with the company/founder name saying a lot ;)).
How much are you going to use your workstation for ML/games?

If you're just getting started and don't have a specific application in mind you should just play with some smaller problems, use Colab and/or use the $300 in GCP credits Google keeps advertising.

If you're going to be doing this for an extended amount of time, then buying hardware will be better; you can get some good deals on second hand high end GPUs on eBay.

The main risk is that you buy a bunch of gear, and then don't use it.
I definitely think you need to apply to different companies. Almost everywhere I’ve worked a Math degree was considered an asset not a liability.
In college I did a side project exploring the possibility of mapping caves by releasing a swarm of flies with bits of wire glued to their bodies and bouncing radio waves off them to get a 3D mapping. Unfortunately the length of the wires required was too long for regular flies to carry them (a little over an inch) but in retrospect I wonder if it would have been feasible to use a larger insect like cockroaches...
That's really well written. I didn't know a lot about Taleb until I saw his attack on (now Dame) Professor Mary Beard on Twitter. I have genuinely never seen anyone so arrogant, he lead an attack on her understanding of the ethnicity of Romans in the UK. Mary Beard is a renowned classics scholar at Oxford, and the attack went along the lines of "You know nothing compared to me because I'm a black belt in probability". He had one study that showed little residual DNA to suggest that there were black Romans in Britain. She had a Hackernewsesq response

1) We know one of the Roman governors was from Africa, but don't know his ethnicity

2) Maybe [something about recessive genes I think] the DNA aged out of the record

3) Maybe most of the Romans went home at the end of the occupation!!!!!!! This one made me think of that Feymnan trait of complete skepticism. Taleb seemed to struggle with the idea that there is not much firm proof of anything that happened in Roman Britain, but not having firm evidence to back up your claim doesn't make you wrong.

It seemed to me, and this is only an impression, that the main problem Taleb had with her is that she was a woman, and a smart one too.
Leaks R Us
It'd be great if there was a service that you could sign up for, which would "deceive" Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites by producing false information about you. For example, if I don't want FB to know what movies I'm interested in, how about liking "random" movie pages on FB? If I don't want FB to know about my political orientations, how about run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?
When Taleb did this strategy, he was buying options years out.
Its been really interesting for me to observe this re-focus on older technology, having been involved in the retro computing scene for the last few decades .. it has grown and grown, to the point where there are now titles being released for machines in the 80's that are nowhere like what our expectations were, back in the day. We have titles on some systems that are simply mind-blowing these days, in comparison.

My favourite 80's system, the Oric-1/Atmos range of computers, has even gotten a few re-designs as well:

The Oric-1/Atmos machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric

The SuperOric: http://andre.cheramy.net/super/hardsuper.htm

The AtmoStrat: http://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?t=1692 -and- http://oric.club/atmostrat

The Twilighte expansion: http://orix.oric.org
(^^ named in honour of one of the best programmers for the Oric systems that ever lived...)

One wonders whether or not we won't see, in a few short years time, some sort of return to the retro-computing ethos of simpler computers, more easily maintained by their interested users, for more advanced tasks.

I could imagine, for example, building an Internet capable suite of software for Atmos machines equipped with the Twilighte card, and do away with (for example) using my MacBook Pro for email/casual news reading. The idea of moving to a less powerful architecture for the most common daily tasks, as perverse as it sounds, really appeals to me. There's no reason I couldn't use the same machine as a Twitter client, also...
“downheadfolk” sounds perfect, I hope people start using that :).
A solution was suggested by the grandparent: make `a==b` call both equality methods.

Dunno if you raise or just return false if they disagree.
Yes, but the weird thing is that before you call unveil, everything is already unveiled, which is not in sync with the dictionary definition of unveiling. I hope a better name is found.
Ask HN: What payment platforms allow for groups with an admin?
I am building an app that allows people to pay for a group they are a member of. What is the easiest way to set this up and allow the admin to keep track of who has paid?
Bankers also think they add value to the world, so
That's not really accurate.

It was never intended to be undetectable, just unhittable, because it flew so high that missles and guns didn't have enough velocity to even reach that high.
Amazon Profits from Secretly Oppressing Its Supplier’s Workers[Hengyang Foxconn]
Basic was a fantastic choice for a computer back in the day, it was very straight forward for people that never used a computer before and pretty easy to fit into the ridiculous size constraints, most Basic interpreters had a few thousand bytes carved out for it, since many computers of the time had around 64 Kb in RAM and less in ROM.
Simple Parenting Strategies for Peaceful Homeschooling
"If heating is your goal, thermal inefficiency isn't really a problem." - I guess my objection is based on an analogy with human-made devices, which degrade the more you use them. Thermodynamically it's fine to power up a computer to produce heat, but the inefficiency I really meant is that every moment the computer is running is another moment when it can go wrong. Perhaps the brain isn't like that: perhaps the brain's activity doesn't change the mind's lifespan. Or, more prosaically, perhaps the mind does degrade faster if it's active more, but evolution didn't care as long as the meatbags kept pumping out their genes.
I think before the market crash in the 80s, he bought a bunch of put options for pennies which ended up being probably several hundred dollars.....literally a 100,000% ROI from a blackswan event

he's still living off that FU money....not sure how rich he is but I estimate 20MM
Hmmm, people can be "single minded" on delivering a good experience for end users. Our project (DB Browser for SQLite) definitely has developers that are. :)
I've used both professionally on large and small projects. Both work fine, but the have a pretty big philosophical difference.

Rails emphasizes writing as little code as possible by having a lot of "magic" that you are supposed to know about by convention. For example, almost every object is available globally with no require statements. Also, model objects automatically have methods on them for every column present in the matching database table - you don't list out the model fields in code. There is also a code scaffolding system that generates what little boiler plate code is needed to add new pages.

Django takes a more explicit approach. You have to import controllers or helpers you are using. Models have actual code that define the schema. There is no codd generator system.

In general, I think Rails is faster to get something running from zero. You can build a functional site in like 30 minutes. They really nail single developer productivity.

On the other hand, Rails sites tend to turn into a big ball of unmaintainable memory-sucking spaghetti if you have a big team working on them. There's just too much "magic" and hidden interactions going on.

Django gives you the tools to avoid that, but it also prescribes less about the "right" way to do things so there is still plenty of opportunity for your app to get bloated or terrible if you do it wrong.

IMO, Rails is much "nicer" in terms of quick productivity and sanded down edges and working solutions out of the box. Just look at how much easier basic stuff like compressing css/js is in Rails than Django. Django is more an assemblage of disparate parts that work together, more or less.

But while both work fine, I'd choose Django because Python is a much more popular language to find a team for and I much prefer explicit over magic in the long run. But that's just me.

tl;dr - Rails is the artsy kid and Django is the engineer.