skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Users never care how easy - or not - something is.

They only care if a feature gives them a good experience, or distracts them with nonsense.

This should probably be the Number 1 rule in UX camp. No one cares if you're a wizard. No one cares if you've perfected the ultimate software moonshot, or if your architecture is a twinkling diamond of executable and perfectly maintainable perfection.

They only care that your product works and makes life easy for them.

If it doesn't, it's somewhere on a scale between irritating and crap. They either won't use it, or - if they have no choice - they'll use it and hate it.
Questions About Bird Scooters and Their Recent $300M Funding, Answered
Hi Scott,

Do you think some understanding of the implications of quantum computers is important for laypeople, and what do you think is the best way to communicate this kind of information? You can see the eyes of `regular people' glaze over mid-sentence if you use the word quantum, and associate any quantum-anything to magic. In the era of clickbait and fake news, this makes misinformation all the more prevalent, especially when it comes to pop-sci/`mainstream' coverage.

tl;dr a) How much of a problem is it that people will believe anything with the word `quantum' in it? and b) What do you think is the best way to remedy this?
The true robot pizzaiolo you always dream (French audio)
On the tether market there is active (as it should be) a $10 billion gorilla that acts as a market maker. The price is 100% manipulated, as it should be.

What they seem to prove is that on this particular market, a wash trader is active, that fakes volume. There is little benefit in this for the gorilla, and a lot of benefit for Kraken itself.
>Feels like this is serious crime. If caught, any idea what would be penalty for such abuse? 20 years Feds club?

I don't know why you're getting down-voted. Crimes that in even the most trivial way victimize cops get prosecuted super aggressively.
I use Apple Maps as my default map. The privacy stance is a strong enough sell, particularly for something as sensitive as mapping. I think I've had to jump to Google Maps once in the past few weeks. (Caveat: I don't drive.)
If you're on Windows, https://www.mailstore.com has a mature, free version that will backup all your local and cloud mail to a searchable offline archive. Uses standard formats. Can also move your mail between cloud providers.
If there is significant data that just has to be transferred within a given, larger timespan, e.g., if you need that update within the day or upload the picture(s) you took over the course of your lunchbreak, or similar situations, you could transfer that data when you want to send masking traffic. This way you don't have to generate dummy data to serve as masking traffic.
Immediate suggestions that come to mind?
You have misunderstood my comment. I realize I have no control over what Safeway does with my information or if they or someone else correlates it with other datasets. The data Safeway has is fine by me until it is correlated with other datasets.

That leakage may be inevitable but the correlation is not. We just allow it today. GP claimed that the existence of the Exactis dataset was not a problem. I disagree. That dataset exists only because many disparate sets were linked with that inevitable leakage.
It's just practice. I'm having now trouble with 2x... feels soo slow.
But that flies in the face of the rampant ageism I've internalized!
Introducing DataCenterHub: A massive repository of info to help researchers
Maybe, at this stage, Grocery pickup is The right thing to build.

A very convenient experience, and it gets a lot of people doing the order online.

Once you have that, and if you can convince people to get their orders at a fixed weekly window, you get delivery density, which is key at lowering shipping costs.

And as far making delivery times convenient in this method - you need to loan your customers a passively chilled box they can put on their porch, so they can pick the deliveries when they come home.

Maybe Amazon could have done this while skipping pickup. But since it's less convenient , it's hard to convince people to pay more, and maybe competitors are cheaper.

But going straight away to on-demand deliveries, with 2 hour delivery time? Sure, that's crazy.
site appears to be down, but from what I understand this is basically the rowhammer attack on mobile phones. very curious to see the details.
Could you give more information on Serial? I find several podcasts that could be...
There's a command for that.

" Use Unix line feeds.
:set fileformat=unix

" Use Windows line feeds.
:set fileformat=dos

" Shortcut
:set ff=unix

" See the current format
:set ff
>while Apple Maps has more accurate drive time estimates (Google always underestimates).

Not for me. It's always eerily accurate. Maybe you're a really slow driver.
That depends on you and your interests! From the very beginning and up through the present, the majority of people in quantum computing have goten there via physics. But my own background is in theoretical computer science---I've only gradually picked up little bits of physics through osmosis (what's a boson, what's a Hamiltonian, etc. :-) ) and there are still embarrassing gaps in my knowledge. And computer scientists and mathematicians, such as Peter Shor, Gilles Brassard, Umesh Vazirani, and Dorit Aharonov, have clearly made crucial contributions to the field, and we plan to continue doing so!

By now, there are large interdisciplinary programs in quantum information science (at Waterloo, Caltech, MIT, Maryland, Berkeley, CWI Amsterdam, Singapore, Oxford, and elsewhere), as well as smaller programs like the one we've been building at UT Austin -- where in some sense, the work of blending math, CS, and physics into the smoothie of quantum information science has already been done. So one obvious option for a student interested in this field would be to seek out one of those programs -- they typically have courses and research opportunities even at the undergraduate level.
At the risk of sounding like a total idiot, could this explain some of the redshift seen at greater distances from earth. A.K.A explain away some of the expansion theory?
People don't make a distinction like that, and why would they? The app UX includes functionality, not just visuals.
Check out some lecture notes, e.g. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/LectureNotes/CPSC519.Winter...
Did you mean "pithy"?
A cryptocurrency doing something shady, who could have imagined.
(Try Not to Laugh) Comic Dubs Compilation
> Better just to wait until your order can be filled at the known value

You're describing a shallow order book. This happens quite frequently in less-liquid markets. The transaction signature of a shallow order book is large orders prompting a pause in trading, as the order book is drained and refilled.

Contrast that to a hyper-liquid market like that for on-the-run Treasuries. You'll have a mix of price and time preferences, with some people wanting immediacy and others willing to provide it for a discount/premium.

The presence of continuous, non-volatile trading--particularly on the downticks, given a pegged asset--is very unusual. Enough so that I've never seen anything like it before in a properly-functioning market. Which is suspicious.
That’s exactly what the GP is saying
Apple taking Maps 'to the next level' in iOS 12
https://serialpodcast.org/

But it is investigative podcast, very different genre to yours.
Exactly. I wouldn't write a kernel or shared library in Crystal and I wouldn't write a webapp in Rust.
Marijuana addiction is real, and rising
I can't find your feed url...
I'm looking forward to see a melting bridge yet again.
Google is reportedly making a games console for the future, but can it compete?
That's true for a minority of living humans[1]. In the US, it's certainly not true for LGBTQ people, women, or racial minorities, all of whom have more rights now than we did in the 70s.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/28/is-the-world-re...
Seems like the site got /.'d
When do you think will we have the first quantum computer that can solve useful problems faster than the classical competition, for example in quantum chemistry?
Facebook, Google and Microsoft use dark patterns to manipulate their users
Yes, I read it, and that would be strictly worse. Apple does not have the reach, or infrastructure, or anything to be handling that degree of data on their own.
A Compositional Approach for Verifying Protocols Running on On-Chip Networks
My favorite is when Google Maps asks questions while you're driving.
Even today, a tiny proportion of software development is actually done with a respectable engineering process.

It's not a myth, and I don't see that it should be dismissed as a pipe-dream to think that this sort of serious engineering approach could be adopted outside the critical-systems industry.

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
They also make money on the data.
People should realize that kraken offers USDT and EURT darkpool orders. Of course they wont show up.
I'm not up on DF's internals, and basic Googling doesn't really clarify to an outsider - what's so big with the current update, and why would it make the next one a final release?
Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas
>The real problem is combining all these datasets in one place for the purpose of perpetuating information asymmetry as a product.

Rephrased, the real problem is (currently) what happens once it gets combined with that wealth of other data (that's been purchased, shared, snooped and swindled) belonging to our data overlords like Google.

>Of course they can probably associate it with my credit card

Or if you've ever furnished an ID for some age restricted purchase while also using the loyalty card. Then of course theres location data from Android/smartphone, vehicle telemetry (mfg, finance company, mobile data service, OnStar, anti-theft service, insurance co 'safe-driver' tracking device), members of the Telco mafia (VZW,AT&T, etc.), video surveillance providers running facial & license plate recognition, et cetera.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23...
I don't. That usually means it crashed!
We basically process the template with a node.js library. We then have a node.js server on a Windows machine that takes a file, saves it onto disk and runs a Visual Basic application on it which itself starts Microsoft Word headless to save the file as PDF.
Depends on who you're selling to.

If you're selling to young people, and you're old, it helps if you're in advertising or producing pop culture or otherwise connected to the zeitgeist.

If you're selling to businesses, experience and contacts in the industry vertical are huge.
Critically, that option only appears after Maps hijacks your view to wherever it pleases. The same applies to other filters too, such as "open now."

I'm stil amazed how hard Maps makes it to view a street name. I can fill my screen with a street and nothing else, and I still won't see its name. I feel like they actually do it on purpose to breed dependence on Maps for navigation references.
At some point google maps did that too - it was especially bad if your partial string as you typed something in resolved somewhere else, then you would keep typing and be searching the complete string in some completely different region. I think it was fixed. But if you type fast, or always have a good connection, it might never be seen.
Any idea if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_(company) would have made a good acquisition for Apple...instead of rolling their own ? Several billion was /is nothing for Apple, and smartphones without maps are quite useless for a lot of things.
Hi Scott,
What's your current position on the likelihood of quantum computing working/being possible?

P.s. I enjoyed your book 'Quantum Computing Since Democritus'.
Agreed, I really enjoyed all the early articles about text adventure games. It really is worth starting at the top of the table of contents and reading his stuff sequentially.

Thanks Jimmy!
> Basic point is: If 37.5 moves the price 0.0002, and 13,076.389 only moves it by half that, then the second purchase is fake (trading to yourself).

No, you're making an assumption which is easily proven wrong. Here is what Kraken's USDT/USD book looks like on the bid side:

Volume Price
125.000	$0.9988
121.898	$0.9987
535.315	$0.9985
871.893	$0.9984
147,258.063	$0.9983

That means if I sell 2000 USDT, I'll move the price by 0.0005. And if I sell 100000 USDT after that, the price won't move at all.
As a whole, Bloomberg's article seems to have little substance. I don't see anything that suspicious.
It is a great read! Also, in the comments on his blog post introducing that paper, he says:

> Well, yes, “the fact of experience” is a toughie! :) In fact, I regard the “hard problem of consciousness” as so far beyond us, that it’s not even clear that science or rational argument give us any sort of toehold.

- https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1438#comment-80656
Grab Singapore mirrors what Uber did to Lyft
I wonder, do they then just enter your data into their database and sell it all anyway? Is there some way for you to ensure it's not included in all the other tenant data they share?
Not surprised. Slack is probably responsible for billions of dollars in lost productivity every year.
Hi Scott,

Its been my longtime dream to work in Electronics Engineering - more specifically, design integrated circuits for Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning applications. I read about FPGA's a lot and love the concept of Reconfigurable Computing. Its because of my love for FPGA's I want to carve out a career in VLSI. Right now, I work in Enterprise Software (BMC Software - as a Support Engineer and in administrator role).

I tried to get a job in VLSI after attending a 6 month finishing school from CDAC, but no luck. However, I still dream of getting an opportunity in companies like Intel/ Xilinx and being able to develop some FPGA based solutions for AI/ ML.

In the next 18 months, I see myself getting my Canada PR and searching for a job there. My current job requires me to be in touch with Java and Java related frameworks to a very small extent (primarily for reading logs, and our development platform is build up on Eclipse.) I am hoping to get a job in Canada based on these skillsets.

What do you reckon is the future of the hardware industry? I heard there's a lot of scarcity of jobs there?

Or should I stick to Enterprise Software?

Honestly need your opinion here.

Thanks in advance, and great job taking up this AMA !! :)
git grep -n foo | vim - -c 'cbuf!'
> It's actually the reverse of fractional reserve banking

It's analogous. (More accurately, it's a carry trade.) If Ethereum crashes more than 33% (given 150% overcapitalisation) the token breaks the buck. Betting your less-liquid assets won't fall below your more-liquid liabilities is maturity transformation and presents the classic risks of fractional-reserve banking.
however google maps does this to me all the time too. But is happens in the opposite direction. I have the map opened to a place on the other side of the planet, and cant find the landmark I'm looking for manually, so I punt and search for the name of the land mark and it takes me back to a local map and shows me close (usually not very close) names locally.

My personal feeling is the extents of the map window should be immutable and sacrosanct.
Not really interesting to me. Most of the stuff here is self promotion, pretentious opinion pieces, and blind praise for finance industry. I stay for the few diamond in the rough articles about tech industry and idk how youd make good fictional storoes from that haha
Very impressive. I wonder how it got the div heights to fit perfectly with the PDF page height. Was it tweaked a lot to fit or the flexbox just magically fill to the page following the page break rule?
And when it refuses to accept a vocal "Accept" or "Decline" when those are the buttons, because it doesn't know what you mean.
The issue is not that a third party is involved, the issue is what that third party does with the information.
GP was probably referring to Serial from NPR[1]. Season 1 followed the story of a murder trial from the 1990s.

[1] https://serialpodcast.org/
It's more important in climbing to have a good strength:weight ratio than to have a massive amount of muscle mass. Consider that every pound of muscle you pack on has to be taken up the pitch, has to be borne by your fingertips during the hardest moves. Also, the act of climbing itself is not really the right volume to promote muscular growth. Bodybuilders like Kai Greene laid out their routines, where they do around 10-20 reps for high volume work, then obviously keeping up strength with 1-5 rep sets. Pile on a very large, protein rich diet, performance enhancing drugs, and you can gain incredible amounts of muscle mass.

Contrast that to Alex Honnold, who does climbs for hours on end, which is more of an endurance sport than strength training. He also has a modest vegetarian diet, I don't believe he is slamming multiple chicken breasts per day like a body builder. I can't say if professional rock climbers use PED's, but they certainly are not interested in packing on extra muscle anywhere except the grip strength/forearms, which is crucial to surviving the hardest routes.
Apple should really make a web version of maps. iProduct exclusivity is not going to help them with Maps. Having another web alternative to Google maps could even help with iProduct sales.
Ageism absolutely exists when looking for jobs in other companies. Age doesn't really matter when you start your OWN business.
There are many new methods cropping up that most people in the data science hype train will be full-on unable to access, including methods on manifolds (even kernel methods on manifolds) and algebraic-topological methods (persistent homology) with enough maths to give Kagglers the screaming meemies.

I'm using some of those for $(redacted, the plan is to make money). Don't follow the crowd.
Nobody really cares about programming language syntax as long as the grammar is reasonably sane and the semantics are clear. Which is the case with OCaml.

The other criticisms are the ones worth attending.
> The maps need to be usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive goals on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know they need. For instance, in the US, it is very common to have maps that have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan, however, the maps are absolutely packed with details at the same zoom, because that increased information density is what is expected by users.

I hope it will be customisable. I'm in Europe and basically every map app has this bug that at a certain zoom level useful data isn't visible (even though it could easily fit on the screen) while a closer zoom requires a lot of annoying scrolling.
Hi Scott, I first stumbled across your blog while I was across the pond doing my Master's in Delft; it looks like you've been relatively successful since then.

I was wondering how you feel that success/celebrity has affected you. Does it actively drive you to something other than research -- say, are you viewing it as a building block to maybe publishing a book or so? Or does it feel like a distraction from research in that "oh why do I have these arguments online" way that we can often fall into?
That's a very wide question. How about something like:

What's the likelihood of quantum computing being a practical method to solve some class of problem in the next ten years?
I had close colleagues at LANL, but many of them (Leonid Gurvits, Howard Barnum, Manny Knill) have since left. I'll probably visit Argonne and Sandia sometime in the next few years to give talks, and to learn about what they're doing in quantum computing. I don't think I've written papers yet with anyone from those labs, but, uhh ... "there are no strangers, just coauthors you haven't coauthored with yet!" :)
How does quantum computing fit in the quantum worldview of Wolfgang Smith?
But this isn't happening. Rather than being artificially inflated, the price of Tether stays at $1 (to three significant figures) on all the exchanges.
Does BreezyPDFLite support CSS like this? Chrome didn't support any of this last I checked.

h2 {flow: static(header);}
@page :right {
margin-bottom: 1.4cm;
@top-left {content: flow(header);}
@bottom-right {content: counter(page);}
}

Edit: Also, tables of contents, with page numbers and links in the PDF:

ul.toc a::after {content: leader('.') target-counter(attr(href), page);}
Interesting. iPhones have the force tap. I assume android has something similar. We could use that as the hover action.
Quantum information theorists such as Patrick Hayden and Leonard Susskind suggest that information can be neither created or destroyed. Do you ever think about such things? If so, how does it enter into your work?
you’ve written about P vs NP in the past. What are your current thoughts on P vs NP as of today? Do you have any speculation as to whether it’s one or the other, and why? Do you think there have been any major recent breakthroughs (say, in the past 5 years) to move us closer to a solution?
Stephanie Lenz and Universal Music Publishing Group Settle 'Dancing Baby' Case
Thoughtful Machine Learning by Matthew Kirk is the closest thing I've seen. It's several years old by now (2014). That said, I don't see many people trying to use this approach in practice.
No, I hadn't heard of it before your comment! Please no one tell the physicist David Mermin about this, or he'll picket the group with his long-running campaign to change the spelling of qubit to "Qbit." :-)
Too extensive and not focusing enough on the core concepts. Teaching mathematics is about making the underlying structure as clear as possible. It's a very hard thing to do effectively.
https://www.alanweiss.com/store/books/million-dollar-consult...

IIRC, Alan Weiss wrote that book back in the early 90's.
BTW, Matt Inglot did a good interview with him at Freelance Transformation.

Also, I just found this article, which I have yet to read:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2013/08/31/the-as...
In that case, the article is wrong. Apple has a team of people working on OSM.
Signs You’ve Got Yourself a Good Web Application Company
This is tangentially related, but one of my favourite little spectral analysis factoids is that because of it Helium was discovered on the Sun before any samples of it were found on Earth. There's an explanation of the process in this link:

https://socratic.org/questions/helium-was-discovered-on-the-...
I can't imagine VR golf working well for this use case. This is a serious simulator. $3000 before the projector and mat.

1. The VR headset would probably have a negative effect on swing or at the very least cause it to not translate well to real life

2. A short virtual club won't have the same weight and feel as a real club.

3. A real club while wearing a VR headset makes being a house cat suddenly very dangerous.

Maybe AR?
That's what makes me nervous about interpretation of GDPR. The EU has 28 member states. Let's say each one of them has a 90% probability of their regulators being reasonable at any given time. Does that mean the chances of the regulators on the whole being reasonable are 0.9^28? (In other words, about 5%?)

As an outsider, I would love to hear that that's not how it works. Do the member states have any checks on each other's enforcement?
Sia (functional decentrialised storage platform) Community performance benchmark
I also prefer it over Google Maps when I'm in an area where I know Apple's data is good enough. I simply find the UI simpler, easier to use, far less cluttered, and downright faster. Apple Maps is buttery smooth whereas sometimes Google Maps is pretty choppy (admittedly, its performance on iOS has improved a lot over the last year).