skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few scientific reasons to believe that the universe is simulated;

One has something to do with the information in black-holes, i can't remember the details but it suggested to me that '3d space' was fundamentally artificial.

Another has to do with quantum entanglement, the explanation for spooky action at a distance could be that the two particles are still in the same 'bit of memory'.

And lastly the Uncertainty principle is thought to act a lot like an on-the-fly loading frame in an RPG.. As silly as that sounds there is not really a satisfying explanation of why things are less certain when we are not interacting with them.

Its worth noting that even if the universe is simulated, it might not be simulated by intelligence, we don't know enough to say its not 'naturally simulated', that might seem paradoxical but 'simulated' and 'artificial' are very loaded words; A reflection of the moon in a pond is in some way an artificial simulation of a moon..
> Considering that you don't know this already... if the Universe is a Simulated Video Game its very unlikely that it was created for you to play.

Well, if I think from bayesian point of view, given that only creature here that I personally can be somewhat confident actually having any sentience happens to be me, then it would feel quite likely me being a player. Especially as this can be single player game as well...
Ask to speak to members of the team you will be joining. Ask them what the day to day looks like and what success metrics look like. Pay close attention to any inconsistencies that come up in different conversations.
Have you used multiple external monitors at the same time? My MBP often gets confused about which one belongs on which side
If you are poor you have much higher tolerance to things like these.
The Great Facebook Crash
Although WSL is great, having a system that could lock itself and start updating at any moment even ignoring user preferences is unacceptable. Trust is at the core of a lot of complaints against Windows, and Microsoft is not helping by forcing updates or reinstalling applications/ads the user specifically removed.
> a caller intending to set a=1 and b=2 could call X(2,1) instead [...] You certainly don't want to prevent this "mistake" by enforcing that the first parameter must be a local variable called a and the second must be a local variable called b and that the constructor parameters must be called a and b too.

An Objective-C programmer might disagree with the last part. But of course it's possible to come up with examples of other things already in C++ that are equally error-prone. That doesn't mean this new thing won't be error-prone too.

I bet that many C++ programmers who are passingly familiar with C++17 would agree that the second line here:

struct { int a; int b; } x { 1, 2 };
auto [a, b] = x;

is syntactic sugar for

auto a = x.a;
auto b = x.b;

Introductory material about structured bindings routinely uses examples like this, where the names happen to match those in the structure, without making it clear that this is not what actually goes on.

> This sort of easily detected error

"Easily detected" in C++ means the compiler detects it. The rest might as well be Javascript.

> Treating a sequence of fields in a class as a tuple is "unusual and slightly flaky" because few and unimportant languages do it

Can you name one? This is one thing I've been trying to discover here, without success.

> In practice, only very plain and well documented structs will be suitable for deconstructing assignment

I do agree with this -- good practice should be to use it only for "obvious" cases.

I will use this feature, when I get the opportunity. I use element-wise structure initialisation often enough. It's convenient, this will be convenient. It also bites me occasionally and so will this.
The entire packaging industry is ridiculous.

For example: Why do garbage bags come in boxes or bags when they could be stored inside a garbage bag that's folded up properly to contain them?
I also have a prediction: in another 10 years, auto-correct will still be broken.

In the 2000s, the Internet still had potential. But, it turns out that human behavior never changes (Machiavelli was right), and now all those wonderful possibilities are gone. Nothing that becomes popular is ever good (for example, popular music)

The trick is to keep things small and exclusive, be the first adopter. Once something becomes popular, it's time to move on to the next thing.

(One platform that doesn't fit the convenience narrative is Bitcoin)
For my dopamine hits, I prefer Reddit (frat party) to Hacker News (church).
This is a problem with capitalism. A sense of social responsibility is traded for personal satisfaction what I am assuming is some form of subtle aggression to those in non-western cultures knowing that their garbage will be sent to poorer and brown communities to live with.
Definitely agree that this could be a problem.

Practically speaking - we keep identities anonymous and so employees are protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you how to prep for these questions anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection, you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting process + helps companies discover more talent.
It doesn't seem very useful to parcel out the limitations of what can be simulated upstream in terms of the limitations of our own physics.
"World wide web", "email, "Internet", and "HTTP" are pretty bad names too.
Heh, first time I've seen this part:

• Two (2) feet apart with lids opening toward street
• At least three (3) feet from cars, trees and mailboxes, fences and utility boxes

Lol. Yeah. As if there's enough room on the street to do that with modern townhouse designs.
I already spoke to a lot of them during my interviews, everything seemed to be good.
The Mathematics of weight loss (2013)
well.. the guys who figured out that we are not in a simulation had a caveat that is was "with classical computers" meaning, we are not being simulated in some version of AWS somewhere.
It specifically does not rule out other forms of computers.
>hands down favourite

I see what you did there
My understanding of Tierra and its successors like Avida are that the "digital organisms" are written beforehand and then systematically (pseudorandomly) mutated. Because the initial "organisms" are written, it would be a stretch to say that "life" developed in these systems. A statement like "the process of evolution by natural selection was simulated in an artificial system" would seem to be more accurate.
Five AI Algorithms Worked Together to Beat Humans at a Strategy Game
https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0110141.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20171111160807/http://fab.cba.mi...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000GCFBP6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Also read the references.
Just to add a slightly different perspective: I'm comfortable with the notation and calculus involved, but had not known how backpropagation worked until now.

I'm not sure if it's the same for others, but I don't find bare text descriptions with formulas particularly useful. Mathematical notation on a page is great for rote application of rules and computation, but by itself does not easily communicate an intuitive understanding of the system the math represents. I have to work very hard to build up mental pictures of systems described by just notation, and those mental pictures often have to move in complicated ways as well.

The relationship between maths on the page and the systems they describe is the same as seeing musical notation on a page and hearing a full orchestra. One is a dry accounting of the facts involved. The other is moving and powerful in its richness and immediacy, a living thing that defies easy communication beyond the experience itself.

Demonstrations like this show you the maths _and_ build up a picture for you at the same time. The result of that is that you can communicate a very powerful idea (e.g. backpropagation) very precisely, intuitively and quickly.

Very much worth a five minute scroll for me; YMMV!
Do relational databases really give you consistency? They can do if you are careful how you write your app. And many people don't use serialisable transactions because of the implications.

Also relation databases enforce their version of consistency. What if I only want consistency within one customer's data but not all customers?

I could have two inserts for operations on two different customers fail because of a deadlock on page slips in a secondary index. I didn't need that consistency but the database didn't know that.
I meant in a longer informal setting - possibly over coffee / drinks in 1:1 sessions.
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. It's only not falsifiable because nobody has devised a test. It's a hypothesis without an experiment. That doesn't mean that people aren't trying [0]. If it is a simulation, you're not going to clip through the wall by running against a corner and jumping for an hour.

The thing is, we don't know where this line of reasoning would even lead. I mean, people used to think that light had to travel in little packets through luminiferous aether [1] and look where that investigation led: Einstein, special relativity, atomic weapons and power, nuclear medicine, etc.

Let's say the universe is fundamentally indistinguishable from a computer simulation. What consequences does that have? What does that say about the types of math that can be used to describe the universe? Or, perhaps better, the types of math that shouldn't be used to describe the universe? What does that say about our ability to model a portion of the universe and therefore predict outcomes? Does it have implications for stochastic processes? Indeed, where is the stochasticism coming from? Is everything predictable or is there some fundamental randomness?

On the other hand, what if we can show that the universe is distinguishable from a computer simulation. What does that mean for our understanding of the universe as it exists? Does it reveal a fundamental aspect of reality that we have missed, or a limitation of our mathematics, or a fault in our computer models or design, etc.? We're dogs learning calculus here, and the universe isn't obligated to make sense.

Even if we can never find a useful test for this hypothesis, the line of thinking itself potentially leads us into new areas of discovery.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/5950832/how-to-tell-if-the-universe-is-a...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
So problems with suspend aren't Windows. It's cheap crap laptops. Yep.
Marketing and shelf space reasons.
It always was they are just not trying to hide it anymore.
The rub is that standards are difficult to productize because they're difficult to iterate on. They're rigid by definition.
25 liters is like a medium to large kitchen trash.

Given an estimated 13 liters per person per week in the household here, $5 for 20 isn't providing a whole lot of incentive.
Facebook Patent Imagines Triggering a Phone’s Mic When Hidden Signal Plays on TV
> lol i wish

MS and Windows QC is such a shit show. I had like 25% battery left on my surface and the fan is running like a mofo. What is the POS doing? Installing updates. What time was it? 10am.. Was after hours enabled (or whatever they call that feature)... Yes it was.. I was so close to flinging that piece of crap across the room.
That makes sense, however if you are Windows user, bash is not an obvious choice for primary shell there.
Deepak, if a company in the Finance industry wanted to be added to the pool, what is the process?
You don't need to pick and chose good vs bad uses. If their are no alternatives then a small price increase is not a big deal. The most effective policy is one applied evenly that let's the market adjust to externalities.

So really oil should be taxed directly, then you tax plastics above and beyond that as needed. But, you never want to apply discounts for some specific use.
Is the game for members only?
If you are poor, you do not have a higher tolerance.

If you are poor, you have significantly less agency to effect change to remedy your situation - so you have no choice but to tolerate things like these.

A rich person can move, install soundproofing, afford air conditioning to sleep with the windows shut, etc...

A poor person can have interrupted sleep.
Allen's point about C's impact on compiler development is certainly true, but we can't turn back history. For better or worse, the reasons why C won (in terms of adoption) have mostly been compounded further over the years, and the case against it has weakened as compilers improved.

As for the future, I'm slightly ambivalent. On the one hand, common sense would lead me to agree with you that, with the exception of some numerical code (where I'm hopeful for further improvements in JIT compilation), most userspace code should be written in languages other than C/C++, retaining most of the efficiency of the underlying infrastructure. On the other hand, there are languages out there (like D, for instance) that essentially fix all the glaring issues of C and fail to get significant adoption. Weird as it may seem from the confines of the HN bubble, usage of C has actually grown over recent years and betting against C has historically turned out poorly.
Please reach out at deepak@thelobby.io and I'll onboard you personally!
Its funny you mention that as Xcode is the reason I can't develop on my macbook. I prefer visual studio. To each their own I guess.
I for one don't readily assume that a top-level comment will be from the OP (since you could just add it to the OP), so I would just say prefix "OP Here" as the first sentence of your comment.
I second this. Seriously my friend, I know native English speakers who don't write nearly as well as you do!
From what I was told, the food remains on salad or sandwitch container will be destroyed in the process of dealing with separated trash. Theoretically, you dont have to care about it much.

However, it can smell pretty quickly and bugs like it, so if you plan to collect plastic for multiple days especially if it is hot, then you clean it up.
The EU legislates product safety by making the person who made it available within the EU legally responsible. This is always an EU based entity. If you want to sell something which falls under a range of product classifications within the EU, you have to take responsibility for that product's safety.

Yes, manufacturing may happen overseas, but generally the product is still sold to the consumer by a locally based entity. Legislating that sellers are always responsible for disposing of products they sell isn't hard - we already do it for electronics with the weee directive.
This is challenging terrain for most humans. It took me months to get decent at walking across loose talus. You really have to learn to trust your boots and listen to your proprioception and be very aware of where your center of gravity is. And you have to have a fairly strong core.

One trick that I've seen used is to carry a trekking pole and use it as a probe. It gives you three points of contact and also lets you check pieces around you before entrusting those pieces with your weight.
I understand what you are getting at, but it seems like "blame the system" is an effective excuse for capitalism to literally destroy the planet we live on.

If you subscribe to the "a fool and his money are soon departed" philosophy, which is essentially like, "well if they want products that destroy the world I will give them that" you are passing the moral accountability buck onto human society in its entirety.

We know that a human is smart, but that people are dumb. We also know that people are responding to norms that they are taught. So you can't teach people to buy your products no matter what with endless advertisements but expect them to change their lives for "the greater good" when your company would literally do anything possible to make a buck.

That's a disproportionate amount of responsibility when "people" as a rule are just doing what they do to get by, but you are doing what you do to get a mansion.
10x programmers exist, but often it doesn’t matter. The only way one programmer is 10x better than the median of a team of solidly educated peers is in the very few extraordinarally difficult problems that require something like real genius. If there’s someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers it’s by avoiding other work that isn’t being tracked as carefully. Also, people who write less new code than others are often contributing above average on things like writing bug reports and doing thorough code reviews. FWIW I’m basing this mostly on real data from a multi year project.
It's slightly inconvenient with my super cool mustache.
I close the lid of my laptop constantly and, even if (when) sleep works, I don't want to wait around. Have never had an issue.
Again, selection bias. Not every employee is going to be happy at every company. And as I noted in a different comment, there are axioms at companies you just won’t be fruitful arguing against. That’s a hard fact of working for someone else.

As for the veiled Damore references, the problem isn’t the discussion that men and women are different in a variety of ways, the problem is he was using it as a justification to argue that his female coworkers didn’t meet the same hiring bar, and that in general some just don’t make better engineers.

Jumping from “there are differences” (which no one disagrees with!) to women shouldn’t be engineers is a huge leap. One filled with bogus arguments, misreading studies (one of the study authors damore quoted, came out and said that he drew the incorrect conclusion from it.). His essay was motivated reasoning, had tons of fallacies (commonly, the map isn’t the territory, and the world isn’t Boolean logic).

As someone who just had a baby, you would not believe how much gender patterning happens from age 0. Even before they are born, do you want the blue or pink elastic band for holding the fetal heart monitor on? Clothes choices, word choices. It’s difficult to tease this out. Additionally, we know the human body is very flexible and adaptable. You can a introduce hormones to a xy and watch it grow secondary sex characteristics. To say that the research is in and we know anything with any certainty is hubris of the highest order.

And this is all before we stop to consider how we want to build the world? Why bother with wheel chairs and ramps? We frequently reject naturalistic arguments when it comes to universal human rights. I don’t see why this is any different.

And on a final note, it seems like people think that we are now in a world of equal oppertunity and all we’re doing now is attempting to create equal outcome. I invite you to really reflect and consider, are you sure we have equal oppertunity? Are you sure? If you are, then you’d be willing to switch places with a poor black woman, because you’d still end up where you are now right?
I posted concrete evidence in this thread. I was just being non-aggressive and diplomatic in my wording here.

It's also useful to stay a least a little bit vague, because we're not discussing very specific cases, people are asking general questions and making general statements. Whether or not something will get you into trouble is not something you can answer definitively without actually litigating the issue in court. Fair use has gray areas.

* Edit, just to attempt make this more concrete: "personal use" is not an allowed exception under US copyright law, unless you're using it strictly for backups (fair use). But "Flights to Rome" isn't a US work, the website is authored by Germans, and hosted in Ireland on an AWS server owned by a US corporation but subject to both local and international laws. It's likely that the Berne Convention governs this example. In any case, it's safest to assume you can't copy the material legally.
v60 on my iMac had random tab freezes all the time on "heavier" sites. Sometimes I'd switch to Facebook's tab and the page would just be white with a loading icon in the center, then maybe 1-2 minutes later it would become responsive again. This happened with multiple sites, too.
Jaeger vs. Zipkin – OpenTracing Distributed Tracers
I think the process or best practices of writing requirements and specs is not well understood by the business side in many industries. This is my opinion would greatly benefit the engineering side.
Spending over 5k dollars only to find out the pass is qwerty ? Lol
I didn't mean to imply that companies are evil, but amoral. Unless it's controlled by a single or small group of owners(who could inject their personal values), a company must be governed by its profit motive. They're like the proverbial paperclip maximizer AIs.

Competition will always drive companies to produce their widgets at the lowest possible cost and a great way to reduce costs is to externalize them. They will do this to exactly the extent that we allow them. Limits have already been placed on companies in a million ways to get them to play by our rules. If only our legal codes could be as simple as the three laws of robotics...
Remind me again why the 'real cost' of plastic is higher than all the other garbage we put into landfill?

I know there is something going on with microplastics or somesuch that I'm not up to date on, but I would have thought that sealing it in a big hole in the ground would be cheap, effective and safe.
We still get yellowpages telephone books vomited on our porch to throw away, about twice a year. Three guys in an overloaded car grace us with them, one guy on each side of the street, throwing yellowpages at houses, and one guy driving.

All paper recycling does is keep paper prices low enough that these people can afford to print these things and force them on every household in a city. Remind me why I should be recycling a renewable resource again? You end up subsidizing marginal paper using businesses, who enjoy cheaper paper prices because of the efforts of millions of people, all because society thinks tree farmers should be paid less.
If you can stand Windows, there're tons of good laptops around. If you can live with Linux, there're some few decent laptops. If you want MacOS... you're a bit screwed, today.
Yeah, after watching this dynamic repeatedly over various projects, I've come to the conclusion that federation is a feature, not the feature. Mastodon is not the first federated network by a long shot: StatusNet kicked this all off and is more or less dead, same with RStatus and a few others. Moreover, there's multiple ways you may want to federate a service: ActivityPub, Matrix, pump/tent (dead?), IRC, even, and you're probably better off tweaking your own protocol to fit your app versus trying to adapt your app to fit the protocol which can be hairy.

You've gotta build a really compelling service first and foremost (otherwise, why bother), and then add federation later. The danger of that is it's really tempting to just skip the federation part if you get big, but it's a critical part that shouldn't be forgotten, but only after you've got a great app people are using.

I'm watching Mastodon to see if this belief is wrong and it ends up taking off, but I think there's a real danger is designing for nerds and getting small time success and validation with nerds and geeks (this is not derogatory fellow nerds), because what we want is not what matters to most people and you risk biasing your community (the Google+ effect, though it happened there for different reasons).

The idealism has to be matched with hard pragmatism. Maybe one of these projects will do that.