skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am very surprised at how many comments this story has gotten on HN. I am even more appalled at how many continue to excuse his actions in the name of "being right" or "technically valid".

This reminds me of the infamous [Wheaton's Law](https://everything2.com/user/OldMiner/writeups/Wheaton%2527s...) states: "Don't be a dick." A very sound piece of social expectation.

As comparison if I were to attempt to learn to be better I doubt I would have any luck with a mentor who swears and insults me irregardless of being right or wrong. I'm curious just how as people it is possible to excuse such behaviour. Does the end truly justify the means? And if so can the end be reach effectively with different means? If someone is a really good soldier but was physically abused as a child is the abuse justified?

I only try to illustrate some of the absurdity that (in my opinion) is the justification of the means in this case. I to suffer from social awkwardness. I often find things funny when in fact they are insensitive. I wouldn't claim that anyone is immune to social difficulties. However, I can say that there is evidence that approaching social interactions with some tact can lead to far better results then being bullish or rude.

Here is a quote from ["How to win friends and influence others" by Dale Carnagie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...): "Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. Human nature does not like to admit fault. When people are criticized or humiliated, they rarely respond well and will often become defensive and resent their critic. To handle people well, we must never criticize, condemn or complain because it will never result in the behavior we desire."

I'll close with a quote from the [four agreements](http://www.toltecspirit.com/): "Be Impeccable with your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the Word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your Word in the direction of truth and love."
I actually find even S30V to be a bit overkill as far as resharpening goes, and prefer softer steels that are easier to keep sharp with little effort and basic tools, even if you need to do it more often - such as 14C28N and VG-10.

But it's all very subjective. I have some S30V and S35VN folders, too, and large 3V choppers (got a couple Fehrmans back in the day on a whim). They're all great blades, and if it comes to a zombie apocalypse, I'm definitely swinging a Fehrman. But until then... ~
> If anyone were to ever get this far on their own and implement the LinkedList class correctly, I would have them make it so that they could make a higher order function that would receive any predicate function and then group by those values first, then its complement.

What does that have to do with any real world problem any company ever had? Do you actually solve problems at your company, or are you busy rewriting everything from Scala to Haskell?
What is the definition of liberal here? Liberal is often right of center.

Also, Nancy Pelosi seems solidly center-politics and Benioff is a capitalist billionaire. If anything they are both boringly conservative in outlook.
I will note that since these are "diseases of the poor," a valid approach would be to eliminate poverty instead of assuming it will always be with us.

You can't ever eliminate relative poverty, which is about "keeping up with the Joneses". But you can make real progress on absolute poverty. This is a fundamental difference between developed and developing countries.

We need to do this anyway to address the growing issue with antibiotic resistant infections.
His videos on neural networks are also great. Current Patreon supporter too! My t-shirt is in the mail ;)
> "we do not break userland, period"

That quote is more accurately read as, "we change things all the time, including user-visible features, and very occasionally, even in breaking ways -- but only because it's impossible to know every single consumer of every single quirk in behavior, and as soon as we learn that one of our changes did in fact break userspace, then we'll change it back".

It's how the kernel community attempts to continue cleaning up decades of tech debt while maintaining the contract with userspace. Honestly, sometimes you just don't know until you try.

It's an inefficient process, but it does sound like the right outcome occurred in this case.

signed,
a former kernel developer
The idea is that Damascus steel was a technology from before there was much metallurgy knowledge.

These days we have a molecular knowledge of steel and can control and test the microstructure at that scale. If you really want the best knife you look to metallurgists not artisans. Whatever you could do with Damascus steel you could do better with modern alloys and science.

There's nothing wrong with the old ways, but there is a lot of magical thinking about knives and swords that doesn't have much basis in reality. Buying in to the mythology can be fun as long as you don't get too attached to the myth and start confusing it with actual utility.

In other words, nobody owns a Rolex because they think it'll do a better job at letting them know the time.
They drive like cabbies, because most of them probably are cabbies, if it’s anything like SF.
> Whether by genetics or through childhood, I'd bet people tend to cluster onto the line separating "agreeable and lax" and "rude but firm" (as a sweeping generality). We often label people who are all smiles while simultaneously extremely strict as passive agressive.

I often wrestle with these dynamics when trying to respond to community proposals, and I think there's a hidden variable: the cost of the time to respond. As a sweeping generality, the short-term cost of writing a straight "yes" (agreeable, lax) or straight "no" (rude, firm) is cheaper than the short-term cost of writing a "yes...but" or "no...but" (politely acknowledging the other side while critically discussing the merits of particulars).

Sometimes, someone can quickly come up with an explanation that is both incisive and pithy. That's awesome, and it's a good skill to develop, but (for mere mortals like me) you can't bank on it all the time. There will be scenarios which require a trade-off (time XOR quality).

I'd wager that those two clusters ("agreeable, lax" and "rude, firm") have normal people who are pressed for time. I don't think people are generally stuck in one of those clusters, but getting out... takes time and attention.
> If you happen to be the hapless person who is innocently trying to make the company successful and who is not paying attention to where the money "should" flow, it can be quite painful for you.

It can be a painful, frustrating, degrading, and ultimately extremely valuable lesson.

It's especially difficult if you're naive because everyone around you is talking about metrics and OKRs, you agree on OKRs with people, and everyone seems to be working toward their OKRs. Everything seems so objective! It takes quite a bit of experience to internalize that (a) metrics have a lot of momentum and lag, (b) shit changes too fast anyway, (c) managers will move teams/groups way before the goals materialize, and (d) by the time they've moved nobody will remember what happened two quarters ago.

So while everyone is talking about the OKRs, nobody who isn't hopelessly naive actually cares about them (beyond the top line stuff executives see). Your manager doesn't care at all if you meet your objectives. They just want to look good until they can move to bigger responsibilities. Sometimes that happens to align with meeting explicit objectives, but quite often there is no alignment at all.

The people who understand the covert goals will do well very well for themselves (at least until the future eventually catches up to them). The people who naively work on their OKRs usually will not.
Interesting, I didn't know that -- thanks for clarifying.
A successful war story on serverless multicloud
What is the context here? Does anyone know sequence of events that culminated in to this?
Did you ever get called out?

Total aside, I'm a spoken word poet and performer. The original Poetry Slam started in Chicago and it's still run by the original guy; a dude who is kinda a dick and encourages the audience to be rude and boo people off stage who are bad.

I use to think this was kinda neat; you know where you stand right? I went up on the open mic several week and did really well. I saw some people get booed off stage that were really terrible, but a few that I really enjoyed -- they typically got booed off due to people not liking the content.

Then I eventually did a narrative about a prostitute in LA. I almost changed what I was going to do since I realized it was an x-mas show and maybe I should do something brighter/happier. But I've had other experiences where changing last minute was a bad idea, so I stuck to my guns and got booed off stage.

I was told I went too long, but people were already hissing at me for all the parts about the prostitute growing up on the streets.

I've gotten good feedback every other time I've done this story. I misread the audience, theme and time of the year.

I thought the booing was a good thing, until it happened to me. I've literally done shows in Dublin, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Denver, Vegas and I've never seen any other venue do anything remotely similar at their open mics. Some have a timer and go are pushed off stage if you go over, but the audience is never encouraged or praised for being rude.

In the comedy circuit, we stopped heckling and booing people off stage years ago. You can push the edge of jokes, but you don't disrespect people on stage .. unless they go over time.

The guy who runs the Chicago scene is the first and the original in this concept of Spoken Word, and the scene is crusty and old just like him. I know a number of performers who hate going there and I think I'm included too.

I still think the master/slave thing with Redis was/is dumb. But with Torvalds .. I am glad that he said this, in the way he did. I think he could benefit from the basic rules on StackOverflow. You can simply say, "I don't think that's going to work because of x, y, z. Look at commit x and try doing a, b and c instead and resubmit," compared to the yelling we've often seen.

I've generally been against code of conducts, maybe because I've only seen them misused or people get pushed out for non-clean/arbitrary reasons. But maybe we're moving into a new era? Who knows, but I hope we find a balance in the middle.

And I still don't think the Redis guy should have made that change; but asked the issue requester to submit a patch with all the changes if they wanted them.

I think there is a balance in the middle.
The Wikipedia page on Watson discusses attempts at finding the source for this quote, but explains that there seems to be no consensus on this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson

It does quote Howard Aiken saying this in 1952:

Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen
large computers in this country, hidden away in research
laboratories, this would take care of all requirements
we had throughout the country

Even though it's likely that Watson never made this particular statement, the sentiment that the statement itself carries was a real one, and certainly existed in the 40's.

What would be interesting to know is when the shift happened from computers being seen as a niche tool to something that everybody would use.
Nerdwriter on YT is pretty decent if you looking for a channel with a focus on art.

Unsurprisingly I see it all over these comments but another shout out for 3blue1brown.
Good for him. Hopefully it would do him some good.
> We found a significant effect in the same direction as in the original study for 11 replications (61%); on average, the replicated effect size is 66% of the original.

EDIT: Similar results to the well-known psychology replication study of a few years ago:

Strictly on the basis of significance — a statistical measure of how likely it is that a result did not occur by chance — 35 of the studies held up, and 62 did not. (Three were excluded because their significance was not clear.) The overall “effect size,” a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies. Yet very few of the redone studies contradicted the original ones; their results were simply weaker.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-scien...
Would love to hear more about this. Email's in my profile :)
See my other comment; if you had been the receiver you'd probably have a totally different attitude. Especially if you felt it was totally unjustified.
Doubling flight time is a huge improvement and could be considered groundbreaking as usually you get incremental improvements of 10-15% a year because of improving battery tech.
It takes a lot of people in the community to have that frank discussion, "How do we tell the head of our project, in this non-for-profit/open source world, that they're a toxic asshole sometimes and should not be proud of that?"
>it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings.

"This seems stupid to me" is a considerably lazy statement. What's worse, it doesn't have any meaningful content beyond "I don't like it." I've yet to see anyone's feelings hurt with the following:

"I'm rejecting your proposition because I believe it will lead to X, Y and Z (problems)"

"Your proposal is not going to work because of X, Y and Z".

"I'm not seeing the benefit of this. Can you explain what we have to gain by it?"

And probably a dozen other direct statements.

At the workplace, I don't care who thinks what idea is idiotic. I care whether they can speak for or against it. And I care whether they are open or close minded about it. Saying "This seems stupid to me" is providing zero contribution to the process.
The "Dr. House" or "Rich Sanchez" effect?
by the way, i'm trying with Aktu to improve the RSS experience, well at least mine :-)
I've always missed a few things that i tried to add to the platform. I mostly wanted to reduce the noise in my feeds and i also wanted to have a way to be exposed to news outside my feeds.
So i built Aktu in a way that same-story articles are automatically grouped together, which helps reduce the noise: instead of having 10 articles about Apple's new hardware event showing up in my feeds, i now have just one big story with references to all the articles... So at the same time, if i want, i can now easily check tens of arictles about that story, articles from my own feeds but also from sources i don't follow.
There's a lot of features that i plan on adding but i'm open to suggestions and would love to hear from longtime RSS users what cool features would be great to add!
Without making a claim against veganism/vegetarianism, you do realize that people have been killing their own animals and eating them for many years. I'd wager most of the people who work in factory farms still eat meat. You don't find a huge proportion of butchers going vegetarian/vegan. I don't think that evidence supports that seeing how your food is killed has any impact on most adults, although it can be traumatic for children. The meet your meat campaign was largely ineffective, whereas making vegetarianism/veganism easy to do has shown actual upticks in vegetarianism that seem to be self fulfilling cycles. People aren't generally monsters, but that doesn't mean they want to sacrifice if they don't have to. Make a product that competes with meat on price, taste, and texture and I think most people will choose the vegetarian option unless there's significant social pressure not to.
There is only one game on that list - GTAV - that performs below 60fps. And for that game, its trivial to lower a few settings and hit 60.
Easy to say, difficult to verify.
You might as well just say it up front: he thinks it was a Communist plot.
bunch of examples here:
https://www.jefftk.com/p/name-gender-over-time
the title of the article implies that there is new evidence for the existence of multiple dimensions, while the content of the article is about the opposite being the case
CNBC thinks Facebook's “FBLearner Flow” is an algorithm instead of a platform
This rhetorical technique where you pretend not to understand what people are talking about does not reflect well on you. And I normally respect your comments quite a bit.

Your direct reply to DC-3 was fine, if combative. Everything you posted below Ws32ok is ugly.
My bad, I had misread the comment the poster made and didn't see that the quote was there. I stand corrected.
anyone? any comments are appreciated!
cos Indian suppliers aren't as big players yet. I think the Chinese suppliers care about US buyer data which is supplied from Chinese factories.
The article is dated Mar. 3, 2016. It could be informative to add a (2016) to the title.
I advise a startup in the bay area and sat in on a meeting with an early investor last week. A plan for raising a series A was laid out and he said "why do you want to raise money outside of being in SV? Nothing you have told me indicates you need funding."
I suspect there was no one single event. His mailing list rants have been known for a while, and the occasionally make it to the tops of sites like HN/Redit/etc.

I doubt it was less of a "Straw that broke the camel's back" and more of just a "We all know this was coming," thing.

Or maybe it was? ... from the e-mail, it might have been words/things from maintainers, specifically around the meeting/conference he mentioned, that forced him to re-evaluate the way he works.
This is pretty much what I did about 10 years ago for my first daughter. I had one additional - have a .com[1] available.

1. https://laaija.com
You can’t be 100% collaborative, or agreeable. There almost always has to be one solution out of many that needs to be be perused.

How does the group select one solution, without being disagreeable? “Ok we’ll choose that one just because we don’t want to rock the boat” is not an effective way to select. Conflicting thought will always exist, from conflicting observation and experience in the problem space. Those with the better perspective have to push, often hard, to make sure the correct path, which others may not see, is selected.

At some point bad ideas need to be halted. I think this is what “disagreeable” is. How you halt them is another matter, but charisma, manipulation, or favors, which are often the “agreeable” approach, just means you’re steering the path using emotion. I think that’s separate from being “disagreeable”.
Hmmm... I guess it depends on your timeframe, but I’m constantly amazed at how much cheaper airfare has gotten over the last decade, when you account for inflation.

Particularly if you look international. 10 years ago a US to Asia flight was $1200-$1400 at the absolute cheapest. Now you can often find flights in the $600-900 range, regularly.
Also, a thought. I would argue that Kei cars aren't subsidized, it's just that Japan refuses to subsidize big cars like America does. Large cars take up more space in car parks, take up more space on the road, and do more damage to roads. It's actually quite reasonable to tax them less.
https://github.com/StitiS/AHK

If you find it interesting and end up poking around to try it, feel free to ask questions and I'll eventually get it updated to my latest.
I dunno. I think git's success is less around Torvald's developing it and more about companies like Github finding ways to capitalize on it.

They kinda made a Freshmeat/freecode that included the code repository, without being as shitty as Source Forge.
They weren't originally. Now? I don't know.
I'm not sure it's a crisis. Nobody who understands research expects every study to replicate, so what is a reasonable standard? 40% having weaker effects isn't a surprise to me, a complete amateur, for whatever that's worth. The point of research is to push the into novel territories of knowledge; like new tech at startups, that's necessarily going to include many failures.

If it's a critique of the scientific method(s), I'm all for very serious work on improving it. But I think the question is, how? Does someone know something that works better that they are holding back from us? Has any method in the history of humanity produced better results (or made more sense)? Should all science stop until it's perfect? What should we do going forward?

EDIT: I meant to add: Maybe social sciences are just really hard. They are a bit less deterministic than many aspects of physics, for example, where gravity is so predictable that a small perturbation thousands of light years away can tell us what's happening there.
That's some fresh info.
What technologies do they hire for?
This is the kind of advice that is probably right, but when wrong is very wrong.

For example, I’d guess the risk-adjusted return is better at a Series B company with product market fit, however you still have to be able to pick well.

But knowing a dozen people who made enough money to retire from joining early-ish at a company that had done a lot of the hard stuff I’ve gotta say it’s certainly not always true.
Calling out someone totally ignoring the point of a post is uncivil?

I personally think that pulling out a strawman is probably more uncivil than calling it out, but whatever you say.
> ... it’s invisible to most people.

that's a really general statement but I'm going to bite. Tech need not be up front and in everybody's face. I think HTTP is the same. It seems reasonable that most people don't know or care what http is or what it's doing at the beginning of urls. Or why it sometimes has an 's' on the end. And I'm even more confident saying that 'most people' don't know about how amazing TCP over IP is.

I'd like RSS/feeds of strongly typed content to be more invisible and prevalent. We're living in the HTML dark ages here.
I thought Jains weren’t into conversion....
And now readers still aren't popular... There is no big replacement that people are using. Google didn't kill the category, it was already dead.
Growing computers in petri dishes
>Show me an instance where his cursing is not related to kernel code.

I think I and many others are reading your statement as:

"Hey, as long as the person wrote horrible code, it's OK to call the coder anything we want".

The whole discussion isn't about how he behaves outside the kernel development. It's about how he behaves within that context.
This is a remarkable deep-dive into the history of RSS and the ideas and vision behind it, and how those camps diverged. But despite beginning the article with Kevin Werbach's prediction that syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass, and RSS took on the role of moving media between aggregators and consumers, rather than between authors and aggregators as originally intended.

With the shift in usage to the edge, RSS found itself in the company of adhoc webpages that disseminated the same content but supported scripted adtech to enable just-in-time display advertising -- advertising which, over time, became a significant source of publisher revenue. RSS was often surfaced in a different user-agent and unable to clearly accommodate scripted ads, so first-party RSS feeds were practically giving away the content for free. With time, this greatly contributed to the waning appetite of commercial publishers for RSS, despite it remaining popular in circles were the content was meant to be spread wide at no cost. Although many news organizations still offer RSS feeds, they're not really marketed prominently, and remain a loss leader to make savvy readers happy.

Since alternate business models never achieved the same uptake, efforts like Google's AMP (and its offshoots like webpackage [1]) are a practical take on the syndication concept again, where the usage of adtech is assumed from the start, and the surfacer of the content becomes decoupled from its author.

[1] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage
Why scientists are transplanting artificially grown “brains” into living brains