skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Protectionism is bad in all its forms.

I read a book once that made an interesting point:

1. English-language films make more money than French-language films because there are more English speakers than French speakers.

2. Because of this, an English-language film can profitably have a bigger budget, allowing better production values.

3. Once a film has been produced, the rights will get sold in every foreign market - with the price set by auction, not by the film's production costs. If French broadcasters only bid $15 million for a $150 million film, they get it for that price.

4. The upshot of _this_ is English-language films look 10 times more expensive than French-language films that cost the same.

5. This makes it extremely hard for French language films to compete.

The reason the French are so protective is because they believe, in the absence of such protection, the French film industry would get its ass kicked by the English-language film industry.

Oh, and for 'English-language' and 'French-language' above, you can insert a bunch of stuff about national culture. How do the police and courts act in your film? What food do we see people eating? What attitudes to sex, violence and alcohol do the good guys show? What political systems are shown, and how do characters view and interact with them? What values motivate the lead characters? What sort of things does the military get sent to do? How do employees interact with their bosses? What do roads and cars look like? Is there literally a character named Captain America?
I feel like this was written in this particular style assuming it was not going to be minified. I think it's ok to use this style if only maintained by a couple of people, or for a small project like this. I do like it's conciseness, but I don't feel the title is appropriate.
Representation is a convoluted thing to talk about, let alone "measure". Many factors influence how many of $group enroll in a course, and with gender there are many, one of the main ones being that many women chose to stay at home and raise their children. You have to consider if the difference in enrollment and/or parcipitation in $jobgroup is down to outright discrimination, or willful chosing of $persongroup.
Theranos is finally shutting down
Progress isn't a smooth line, for civilisations, startups or individuals. In Europe, the Roman Empire invented a whole bunch of stuff that we're only reinvented recently (and some things, like concrete, that we still aren't as good at). The Dark Ages were not a progression from that.

There were, however, more people living in medieval Europe than there were when Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers. So yes, I'd count that as progress. As for lifestyle, it's hard to say... the life of a medieval peasant in Europe wasn't that bad. They had a lot of security, a community around them to support them, rights that were guaranteed by that community. They worked hard, but at work that was meaningful to the community. Things might have been worse in the cities, but the vast majority of people in medieval Europe lived in rural farming villages. I wouldn't necessarily say that they had it worse than a hunter-gatherer. Or even than a modern tech worker...
Most of us end up constructing a narrative where whatever choices we made were the right ones, unless they go so disastrously wrong that we can't fool ourselves. So why agonize so much?
I did some contract work with some mushroom people. I was in the minority of staff that wanted sunlight. We got a large office for the four of us, the other 30 were in almost complete darkness in a sea of cubicles. They actually blacked out their spaces with material.

We had plenty of plants, fishtank and my customary giant Pac-Man. Good times.
I'm surprised not to see any mention of AsciiDoc, I know that it is what some publishers use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc
For side-projects I like to play around with PureScript.

Mostly because I really like things like simple-json, where it can parse a json string based just on the type you are expecting.

It looks powerful, and i.e. Halogen framework has decent examples, documentation, and seems to be designed in a way, that provides you plenty escape-hatches for your components, once you need to do something more complicated.

If you need even more escape hatches, the FFI is quite un-assuming.

On the other hand, I haven't shipped anything with it, never used it in anger, but I still like it.

I like to use Justin Woo's reference when looking for purescript library recomendations. https://purescript-resources.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I did use clojurescript in previous job (4 years ago). If you like lisp's it is nice. I did. I liked the libraries, and this was the first time I seen the "All the state of the app will be changed with atomic updates, there is only one state-var" pattern. I never did anything too complicated with it, and never used ffi.
I experimented with Beaker Browser[1] and explored some dat:// pages. It reminded me when I first used the Tor Browser. Most of the pages looked like they were Geocities pages, and the same goes for dat:// pages - they are like something from the late nineties web. So much for the term 'Web 3.0'

[1] https://beakerbrowser.com/
I have a degree in mechanical engineering and 2 years later am a software engineer pivoting into a datascience/dataengineering role after building an nlp product for our business.

I only have my experience and don't know how repeatable it is, but I just got here by building stuff that I thought was interesting.

Right at the end of college I tried to build a connected hardware/data harvesting startup, and it failed because I was a naive idiot who didn't understand just how hard the financials of building a hardware company were (all of the money up front for manufacturing runs) and how much time I would have to spend on things that I wasn't good at or really interested in, like building out supply chain and design for manufacturing or dealing with radio emission problems.

But over that time I collected a couple of relevant awards (decently sized pitch contests, won at a mlh hackathon I did for fun etc.), built interesting prototypes of the hardware that worked and a web platform that supported it that people thought was interesting and that all worked as a hedge to show that I can at least build interesting things. So when I looked a recruiter came to me with a software engineering job at a startup that I thought was novel and interesting and I ended up taking it.

Once I was there I saw a problem with a lot of labor going into dealing with relations between a bunch of types of texts, so I built a preliminary thing to automate as much of that as possible using relatively basic clustering and putting a person in the loop to collect labels so that I can come back and try something supervised later. The CEO brought on a chief data scientist to help me fix everything that I messed up and build a more scalable deployment pipeline and architecture for datascience microservices and now I work with him.

But yeah, my experience is just that I built things and tried to make sure they worked and were sane, and then just showed people those things to convince them to let me do that for other things I wanted to do. I have a couple friends who did relatively similar things with pretty similar results.
Get some high quality LEDs, like those produced by Yuji[0] (not associated/sponsored), it's the next best thing. Bad LEDs are the worst, fluorescents are second, then incandescents, then good LEDs, then natural light (when it's not too gloomy outside).

[0]: https://www.yujiintl.com/
I added a comment there, thank you.
A couple light / young adult fiction books I've read cover to cover:

星虫

クローズドノート

パラレルワールドラブストーリー
Speaking as not a university level guy, I'd really be turned off of programming if there was more focus on CS concepts. I mean sure they came around, but I spent more time making working software, which is much more gratifying than implementing a map or linkedlist (which iirc we also had to do).
Show HN: VidHug – Group Video Greetings
Their ability to code is usually sub-par, but they ask the right questions about the data, which is critical in the data setting that we work in.

We don't work in advertising / marketing / business analytics, which is very easy to have an intuition about; and we don't strictly work with images, which, again, isn't terribly difficult to have an intuition about. So a strong scientific background is actually a major plus for us.

I could see that if we were doing purely deep learning image classification or advertising prediction then the physics degrees would be less useful, but thankfully we don't.
I2P maybe?
Ask HN: How to consume HN?
Hi All, I've been a passive reader of HN for several years now. After becoming increasingly lured to engage and interact with the community over this time, I finally registered on the site today to ask my first question:

What ways do members use to stay up to date with new threads, subscribe to topics, and receive notifications, other than manually checking the site several times a day (which I currently do)? Are there feeds, configurations or APIs that I can hook into?
Ask HN: I'm 40 this year, and have depression. Any words of wisdom?
I read comments and stories here most days, occasionally comment on or submit things, and hold HN in high regard for the variety and quality of discourse.

I'm 40 this year and as a milestone birthday it has me ruminating on how to steer my life in the coming few years. At 20, I was a technical support manager with 20+ staff. At 25, I was travelling the world as a technical trainer and event speaker. At 30, I was self-employed with a good income from podcasting. At 35, I was divorced and had to start from scratch. For nearly 5 years, things in my life have been a lot harder to do achieve than they should be. At 40, I'm at a crossroads with a metaphorical blank canvas. I want to be more content with life at 45, 50 and 60.

My job (technical consultant, proactive and reactive) keeps the roof over my head, but I'm not jumping out of bed in the morning to do it. My motivation is at an ebb. I don't exercise enough, but I'm starting over with that. I've started intermittent fasting for mental clarity and that seems to be helping -- and this Ask HN post wouldn't have happened without it.

I have anhedonia, but I've accepted that when I find something fun that'll go away. It's a symptom of the low-level depression that comes and goes, and the best medicine I've found for me is fresh air and exercise. This should not be considered a cry for help, it's something I have a rational control of, most of the time.

And so, I Ask HN: I'm 40 this year, and mentally damaged -- any words of wisdom?

Thanks very much for reading.
we are way overdue for a source code and architecture evolution history here. the way this started as a toy and exploded without any noticeable performance problems shpuld be a good case study.
I attended said private schools, which were 95% white and located right in the middle of school districts whose high schools are way over 75% minority with busing. And these were the severely underperforming public schools. One district over was a public school that's as over 75% white whose performance was overperforming. Both belonged to the same school district.

If its effects result in something that looks like systemic racism, it should definitely be given careful scrutiny.

Edit to add: A sibling comment talked about how brand new private schools created in the 70's post-desegregation world were openly discussed as being created so schools can stay white. I was under the impression this was common knowledge and it corroborates with what I heard growing up in NC and talking with folks who lived through it.
Grace Hopper explaining nanosecond: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8
Webinar: Free Monitoring (on Steroids)for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB
Ethereum is only 3 years old.
I'm seeing laws increasingly implemented and used to protect the rich and powerful from the plebs, and am rapidly losing any faith in the justice system.
Shallow, sad.
Starting Blogging
I am soon hoping to start a blog about programming (python/go/javascript/etc) and about observations on technology in general. What are your suggestions on sites to use? (Dreamhost/AWS/etc) and platforms? (jekyll/wordpress/django)? Thanks
The large companies can both benefit from copyright protections while ignoring other companies and individuals copyrights. A magazine that keep putting in copyrighted novels would get sued. Somehow when google let's people upload movies to YouTube and remove it after it has already been uploaded, it's alright because they don't want to pay for employees to pre screen uploads.

That was fine when they we're dumb platforms, but when they started picking and choosing what content was allowed based on their own interests they really gutted any sort of claim to just being a platform
el.classList isn't supported by IE < 10
For the most part I agree with the sentiment of this article. However, I am currently in my office with sunglasses on because of the abundance of 'natural light'.. It can definitely be a hindrance at certain times, but overall it is a perk.
Well not according to the people who constantly talk about Supply and Demand. If there's a massive supply shortage as implied there ought to be a corresponding increase in Compensation no?
Thank you for sharing your methodology.

A pointer to the study that you're probably thinking of is research done by Paul Nation and Robert Waring (vocabulary researchers). They cite their own 1985 study and a 1989 study with the following quote: "With a vocabulary size of 2,000 words, a learner knows 80% of the words in a text which means that 1 word in every 5 (approximately 2 words in every line) are unknown. Research by Liu Na and Nation (1985) has shown that this ratio of unknown to known words is not sufficient to allow reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of the unknown words. At least 95% coverage is needed for that. Research by Laufer (1989) suggests that 95% coverage is sufficient to allow reasonable comprehension of a text. A larger vocabulary size is clearly better." [1]

1. http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/bibs/vocab/cup.html
I recall a new transatlantic cable constructed a few years ago being advertised as shaving off a few milliseconds. Trading and cloud providers were mentioned as target customers. I don't know whether they also route public internet traffic.
Honestly, I don't have a good way. It doesn't happen often but sometimes I just end up with a 20+ character identifier. Seems to fit in fine in Java land though. And like you, if I want to do a rename, my IDE will help me do it better than I ever could alone.

I will note that I usually find a better name after it sits there for a while and starts to not make sense. Also after hearing complaints from other programmers about "why is this called x when it should be y :)".
"dat:// websites work just like any other webpage. They’re a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that come together to form a webpage"

So there's nothing technical driving that dated look and feel...
My take was the article left the reading feeling most startups are raising large amounts of capital.

When actually, most probaly are not. But this is almost impossible to measure as who can survey everyone with a side project.
Is the pressure of running these companies making Musk go mad? Even his physical appearance has been degrading, clearly as a result of over work and stress.
> conditioned from childhood

That's parents job. Just as it is important that you give healthy food to your children and don't just let them eat fast food even if they would prefer it, same goes for entertainment. But the state shouldn't set a limit on burgers per month for you.
My desk gets the full force of the sun after noon. I have blinds, and still build a makeshift sun-blocker out of an old box. Too much light can definitely be a negative.
Do they do this because they want to enforce their own view of utopia onto others? That excuses nothing.

>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

-- C. S. Lewis
Adding onto this, every physics PhD I've talked to has really impressed me with how much problem-solving they tackled during their stint in academia. You really said it succinctly with "a physics student could find themselves having to learn practically any technical skill".

Running and extending numerical simulations with supercomputer clusters is just something you have to learn to do in order to solve your problem in some cases, apparently.
My FastMail accounts (personal and work) tend to sit stably around 10–12MB (when open for days) if I have only opened the mail part, and nudge up to 15–17MB if I have also opened the calendar, settings and address book (which are modules loaded separately on request). As you would imagine, large emails will inevitably increase the memory footprint while they’re loaded, until they perhaps get evicted from the LRU cache after viewing many more emails.

This is what comes of caring about performance and memory footprint. It doesn’t hurt also that almost all of it has been done by one guy rather than having fifty or more people all adding, adding, adding in uncontrolled fashion.

And Topicbox, our group email (mailing lists) product, is using 7–8MB for browsing archives. (It’s definitely simpler than FastMail.)

Somehow, large teams like Gmail’s, which have vastly more resources than us, are never good at memory usage, and seldom good at performance. I have some vague ideas about why this is, but it’s initially quite counterintuitive. It does seem to be a fairly consistent observation, though: small teams actually have a big advantage in such matters.

I’m almost sad that this was all under control before I started working at FastMail early last year, because it’s hard to justify improving it further, and I do find optimising things like memory usage and running performance to be such fun. (I know of a couple of ways memory usage and startup performance could made reduced; but the main thing for startup performance will be service workers and a persistent data cache.)

Meanwhile, I often have to interact with a Jenkins instance with a plugin that has a habit of redrawing a large table from scratch every second or two when a build is running, and keeping a reference to the orphaned DOM node. It can consume almost a gigabyte an hour.
Calculus of all things was not an end by itself, but a set of secret tricks by Newton to prove results about the orbits of planets (that then he translated into a more cumbersome geometrical language)

Then there are the three branches of modern mathematics, according to V.I. Arnold:

1) modern hydrodynamics and PDE, are just guys procrastinating while they are paid by the manufacturers of nuclear submarines

2) celestial mechanics, control theory and ODE, are just guys procrastinating while they are paid by the manufacturers of rockets and missiles

3) number theory, are just guys procrastinating while they are paid by the CIA to develop cryptographic tools

agriculture : this kid is just playing with small seeds instead of collecting nuts for winter

computers : just tools to speed-up the important computations of nuclear reactors

TeX : the guy just had the write a damn book about algorithms but spent 10 years procrastinating

Bach : the guy just wanted to glorify God

I stand by my point that nearly all important advances of mankind are tools developed to solve a long forgotten goal.
That's rather sad considering the degree isn't going to say Online and Georgia Tech is top 10 in the world in Computer Science and online or not that credential carries real weight for people in the know.
What's more important in the InfoSec industry, a degree or certificates?
sometimes I think that I'm a genius
UTorrent team releases new streaming service “uTorrent Web”
SEEKING WORK: Embedded/IoT development, development process consulting, product quality consulting

Location: Munich, Germany

Remote: preferred

I'm an experienced (>10 years) software engineer with management experience. I have a master's in mechanical engineering.

I've worked on all stages of embedded products, from product management, to specification, to coding, testing, and qualification. A lot of my career was spent working on safety-critical systems up to ASIL D / SIL4.

How I could help you:

* advise in improving the quality of your product
* close gaps in your team's embedded development expertise
* organise and manage your development efforts
* provide training
* bring automated tests and continuous integration to your embedded projects (DevOps for embedded!)
* close gaps in your team's embedded development expertise
* help you comply with safety regulations

my current projects:

* training and advising several German Fortune 500 companies on DevOps
* managing a small, experienced team in the development of an industrial robot
* advising a multinational company in the development of a highly safety-critical (ASIL D)
automotive electronics component
* advising a startup in the IoT development tooling space
* coaching a startup team on improving their development workflow

Contact me at luca [at] ingianni.eu
Root | Columbus, OH | Full-time | Onsite | $80k-$150k |https://root.engineering/

Root is an auto insurance carrier, like GEICO and Progressive. We use data science to identify and insure good drivers, reducing insurance premiums for good drivers significantly as a result.

We're a startup — we're 150 people who have been working on this since March 2015. We've built an iOS and Android app that gathers data on how well people drive. We use that to set insurance prices. To build the best possible product and user experience, we went through the arduous process of starting an insurance carrier from scratch.

We're focused on becoming a national insurance carrier and are now live in 20 states.

We've raised $178M in VC and we're looking for more talented engineers to join us.

Tech stack involves Ruby / Rails and Javascript / React Native.

Email us at chris.evans@joinroot.com to apply and we'll respond to you promptly.
(Live Briefing) Facebook and Twitter Executives Arrive on Capitol Hill
You might also invest in property to retire (unless you are sure your pension will cover it) and so that you are not as susceptible to fluctuation in rental costs.
Unless the programmer is programming at a very low level, the listed events occurring are out of his control. CPU caching is mostly transparent in the ISA, disk seeking is scheduled by the kernel or in storage controllers, file buffers are cached in the kernel, application frameworks also provide layers of caching.

For the majority of programmers who want to get their shit done with straightforward code, few dependencies and acceptable performance, this is "interesting to know" but not "should know".
>It costs nothing to link to the original study, which is online somewhere, in some format

a) You have no way of knowing whether the data beyond what is linked to in the article is available online. b) Finding it is not free if it requires the reporter's time. c) Bloomberg is hardly an example of the "sad state of modern journalism."
That might be true in other cases. But here, there is no negotiation because we're not even allowed to know what's being negotiated. They won't tell us how often these powers are used, and they lie about how much it benefits.
Funny, as I'm starting to use it more and more.

If I want windsurfing, snowboarding or skateboarding tips the quality can be excellent.

There are some great SEO channels and stuff for CSS Grid.

Even with my son, we can get short lectures on the stuff he is studying at school.
where do you find php contracting for that which lasts long enough to make 350 a year?