skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The assumption that savings must always have positive real returns, is one of the most weirdly persistent fallacy in economic debates.

Historically, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.

Even in societies with financial systems, getting low risk, hassle free, liquid, positive real returns has been difficult for a large part of history. This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. In general, most things require maintenance to keep their worth.

The 20th century was probably the most notable exception. Because of unprecedented demographic and technological growth, positive risk free real returns were easy to find. The effect of recency on our collective minds probably explains some of the confusion people have about this. It is possible that under favorable conditions, wealth can have positive returns and even compound into very good long run returns but it is not a guarantee and there is nothing natural about it. It may not continue forever, particularly amidst an aging and retiring population in a world no longer as rich in easy to exploit natural resources.

While people are used to get negative returns on very short term purchases, you buy fresh vegetables at the supermarket, even if they degrade over time, many can’t seem to accept the normalcy of negative returns on longer term assets. In nature, squirrels’ nut caches have a certain percentage of losses from theft and spoilage. Real returns tending towards the negative is natural even if they can seem unusual for people just out of the 20th century.

There are good reasons to keep government debt low enough but long term possibility of repayment is not a huge worry when market real interest rates and safe asset returns are very low or negative. In the latter case, you can just wait and let the real debt evaporate through inflation.
I think they just make it illegal to sell any tobacco.* The black market would not be an issue because smokers can get the same drug from e-cigarettes, which are almost certainly much safer.

*Possession would still be legal, because punishing people for using drugs is dumb.
Success Criteria: 21 Years of Software Engineering
Related:

Unix History:

https://www.levenez.com/unix/
It's not about the number of windows but about the very simple model of what they show.
What are "Christian Ethics"? Didn't Jesus say the law doesn't matter, just believe in Him?
Also, http://wikimapia.org/2206402/Ventilation-building-for-CN-Rai...
Has Chrome fully taken over yet?
Unfortunately not.

The use case for issue deletion are security issues, which should at least be hidden from public for some time. deletion would work as simple ad-hoc feature until hiding issues (visible only to creator and admin) can be implemented. it's ruby so I guess it would take 6 months for such feature.
And to be fair, the original commenter didn’t say that the only thing sent was the wiki article. It might be one of a dozen URLs included in the company’s reply boilerplate.
Nice article and analysis! I'm actually considering scrapping the trie used in my project to something based off of this one, with some modifications:

For instance, find_node(c, Node48) could avoid the branch if a non-existing index points to an additional entry in child_ptrs that's always NULL. Lookup would be comparable to the Node256 version.

Another thing that could be done, is to scrap the Node48 entirely, and implement two new structs to replace it: Node32 and Node64, and use respectively AVX2 and AVX512. These can be based off of the Node16 version. It remains to be seen if these will yield better performance than the branchless Node48 above, especially if power management kicks in when mixing AVX512 with older SIMD generations.

The trie in Lwan (https://lwan.ws) does an interesting trick to reduce the amount of memory used in the equivalent of a Node256: instead of 256 pointers to a node, it has only 8 pointers. Characters are hashed (MOD 8). The leaf node contains a linked list of key/value pair, and an actual string comparison is performed at the end. (Lwan cheats here by avoiding a string comparison if the linked list contains only 1 element.) Works pretty well, as it's part of the URL routing mechanism.

One other experiment I've been making with tries, is to use the idea of key compression and use it in a different way: slice it every 4 or 8 bytes, consider those bytes as an arbitrary integer, and add every chunk of it to a hashmap<int, some_struct>, building a chain for the next lookup in some_struct. The prototype I wrote works pretty well.
Cloudflare workers seems amazing and I would love to migrate few thousands of nodejs lambda I have to cf workers... But...
I noticed the 1mb limit for the function size, most of my functions are between 1.5mb and 8mb depending on the npm packages required.
Also execution time for my functions is between 200ms and 30sec. (Loading remote data, transform it, generate pdf,...) and workers are limited to 5-50ms!
I think our society tends to offer respect and status to others for some specific (mostly superficial) reasons, and developers usually don't meet the criteria. I can think of a few different cases of this:

1. I feel society respects people with authority over others and most developers have none. Most of us are just implementing someone else's high level idea (granted, a great idea implemented poorly can be useless, so good developers are very important in fact. It just isn't clear to an outsider as to why).

2. We also respect others who have great social skills, but the word "coder" or "developer" tends to conjure up an image of some guy sitting behind a computer screen by himself for hours on end (if you knew nothing about what a software developer really does). Some devs will have good social skills, some will not, but I would imagine the average developer job does not necessarily require it.

3. The stakes matter. If a developer screws up, you revert the change or fix the bug and most of the time the worst case scenario is that the company lost some money (with some exceptions like those who work on self driving cars or autopilot). Doctors are dealing with peoples lives. Law enforcement, firefighters and military risk their own lives for others. Lawyers and high level executives at larger companies work in positions where the economic stakes are often high, not just occasionally.

4. We respect those who are at the top of their respective field. With software development, there is nothing that those at the top of the field are displaying to the public that differentiates them from anyone else in the field (that the average non developer can understand, anyway). This is very clear if you're an athlete or professional musician.

I would say that software developers as a group are usually fairly intelligent people with respect to technology. I think referring to someone as a "techie" does not make an assumption that someone isn't knowledgable about the domain of tech, but may come embedded with an assumption of lower status (with respect to the points I mentioned above).

As a developer myself, I do sometimes regret my choice given the low status that this job carries (at least in North America - perhaps in other parts of the world this is different) in spite of the fact I get paid fairly well. On the other hand, I enjoy writing code and solving difficult technical problems, so if I just forget about what people I don't know think about me, then the job is great. Hard to beat a comfortable, high paying job where I get to work on interesting problems and mostly get to avoid the annoying political battles that are often ongoing in large orgs.
Super Mario World Credits Warp Explained
>>not many people cared

No person in India cares much anybody or anything else. Unless they are directly affected by it.

People optimize so much personal good, that bad things happening to others are actually celebrated.
Some taxes are on “sins” and some are on “luxuries”. But the money’s still got to come from somewhere. Who wins if we ban smoking and cut that money from the NHS? No one.
Apple has long been the subject of criticism for its pricing. Usually by tech people who think that the cost of components is what drives the final price of a product. This is wrong.

There is a SINGLE driver of price for a is product: how much people will pay for it. That’s it. If people are willing to pay the price of a product, then that is the fair price of it. Simple as that.

You can get into some game theory about the sweet spot of lower price vs volume vs profit, but Apple seems to be doing pretty well in that area already.
A surprisingly large part of the population is completely oblivious to all of this and they don’t care unless the effects are so directly in their faces they can no longer ignore it.
Tester101
Same with sugar in cigarettes, even. Sugar is a major ingredient, and makes them easier to inhale compared to cigars, which partly accounts for their global popularity.
$500 million -> optimistically 2000 developer-years, assuming no budget for hardware, management or profit.

I'm not saying someone didn't mess up or that the security breach wasn't preventable, I have no knowledge of that, but I hope no one on HN is surprised that building a site that on the frontend handles traffic from a significant fraction of the US and on the backend interfaces with basically every insurer in 30-some states is something that might take hundreds of developers a few years to develop.

(Which again, is not meant to imply that there wasn't any waste or that the project was completely as efficiently as possible, but when people say they could have done it in a quarter with 5 people, I say, what is wrong with you?)
The fact that the x-axis variable only explains a small amount of the variance in the y-axis does not mean that the effect is not real or not statistically significant. In this case, it's exactly what you would expect, even if the effect is real; surely you don't think it's reasonable that there are no other factors affecting literacy.

Saying "just use your eyes!" instead of actually doing analysis can lead you to all kinds of incorrect conclusions -- both false positives and false negatives.
BTW the real horror here is not that google is lying to the public — that’s expected. It’s that they are lying to their employees. Just awful.
I'm from that region in Argentina, my state is called Misiones (Misions) because is the area where those where concentrated, the missing piece is that it was heavily populated by European migrants in 3 waves: beginning of 19 century, post WWI and post WWII; the same happened on the Paraguay and Brazil neighboring areas, this lead to a rapid development of the whole region, which continues today.
Now, sadly, most of that development didn't include the guarani tribes that today still live in poverty.
The only aspect that seems to remain in guarani culture from those times is music, playing guitar & violin, everything else, construction, writing, etc, is gone, this includes religion.
Let's write a PDF file (2015)
I found that for most problems where people use Excel I prefer CSV, various command line tools (awk, perl and the awesome xsv) and Vim.
I'm regularly faster that way. When data manipulation is involved my solutions are robuster, more reliable, work well even for huge data sets and most importantly: they are reproducible.

That being said, there are two features that Excel - or any other spreadsheet software for that matter - provides, which are missing from any Vim solution I have found:

1. Hiding overly long cells.

In most tables I see most of the cells have reasonably short lengths,
but almost always there are a few overly long outliers.
What I want is a way to manually set the column width and then all
outliers cut-off. When vim's conceal feature came out I hoped someone
would make a plugin to that effect, but as far as I know no one ever did.
Looking into the problem myself a while ago, I found that it's not trivial to do.

2. Quick and easy filtering.

I find the column filters in Excel pretty useful.
The first value they provide is that they give an overview
what values are actually used in the column. Second value is
to temporarily hide all the rows one is not interested in.
They are also very easy to use. I would like to have some
easy way to do that in Vim just for viewing and without actually
manipulating the file.
Mentally Ill, Alone and Forgotten
Is there such thing as foreign in the internet? Can you choose to just not adhere to a law that protects the users? If the law was unfair it would be fair to resist, though.
Pretty sure that 4bn gap is more than compensated by the fact that smokers die earlier.
Google admits “white” is a huge power drain on Android devices
This is a feeling you'll experience a lot looking back on the history of computing. Sadly, it appears we live in, if not the darkest timeline, certainly one of the worst.
Can anyone elaborate - did Protestants not value intelligence or learning as much as the Jesuits?
Well, there's Free as in Speech, and Free as in Beer. (And there are sub-categories, like "Royalty Free" and the ability to use it without being sued for patent infringement)
It just happened today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/national/health-scien...
This is the right way to do it in my opinion.
Does the fact that a worker can run in one of the many data-centers of Cloudflare guarantee some sort of multi-regional redundancy/high-availability in case they have a problem with a region?
> I’m actually quite stunned seeing that you are running code from thousands of different websites in the same process.

Are you also stunned every time you open your browser? Because it's the same thing.
Right, but it wouldn't be possible for a modern CPU (for example: how would you retain compatibility with older architectures? how would you patch it if you find a critical bug in an instruction?)

Furthermore the parent was asking about having no microcode running on the CPU which is what I was speaking to. A CPU designed to use microcode can't be run without microcode. But yes, it is of course possible to design the CPU to not use microcode in the first place.
Maybe a (1998) subject tag would be in order here, that's when the current web page went up. The language is much older though.

Quite influential in those times ("typed prolog" with a better compiler), but didn't gain that much attention and some mercury projects were rewritten then in other languages.
(One of the wealthiest companies in the world) + (increases prices) = not caring about its loyal customers.
Where does all the solid waste go? Unless you mean they are big enough where they'd need replacement before needing to be pumped.
Even slower and even more vendor locked... to Google. As a developer we don't a crap as long as we support "the latest versions of Chrome" but as a user, you can't really use any browser but Chrome these days if you want the site to actually load.
Oh this should be an exciting 150 move game that ends in a draw. Looks like I know what I will be doing for the next 9 hours.
Publication bias is a sort of multiple testing at the meta level: different groups of scientists try out different hypotheses — but only one each — and some of them just barely pass the statistical tests and thus get published.

Not saying that happened here! I haven’t even read the paper. But it is a valid concern when mining data for patterns, especially when those patterns have a questionable theoretical basis.
No, and your example is perfect. Getting shot can end up NOT leading to B (and then not leading to C). Get shot in the leg and live. No B means you can’t assume C.
I think it's a bit different, on HN and Reddit it's much less about sharing ones life (there are subreddits for this, but in general, no). It's more about sharing interesting discussion and insight around content.

More than that, it's semi-anonymous, meaning it's not so much the relationship between people it's the relationship between content (or topics). This is a dramatic difference because it's harder to get into the loop of seeing other people happy.

Finally, there aren't push notifications for HN. I actually wrote a chrome extension to enable following discussions and push notifications.. I didn't really think it was appropriate to release because it would lead to more engagement, which is kind of a bad thing (e.g. lead to flame wars).

Anyway, they may not be "that different", except in a few key aspects.
Then any other database written in pure Go would be sufficient to keep the index.
I can easily see this list growing over time, as more applications and deployments of AI and DL occur. Perhaps this can be the equivalent of the Risks Digest, which documents the risks to public safety and security through the use of computers.

https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/
>> he mentions suffering from vicarious trauma so much that at some point he was crying with patients every day.

Actually experiencing someones emotions is one of the most helpful things you can do for them. I say actually because it seems therapists train to pretend to understand. They train to hide their own feelings or let a client try to support them. It's ironic that they want people to become their authentic selves, but that's the one behavior they won't model. I have no doubt the guy in this video did wonders for his patients.
Statitstics and non-biased double blind emphereal fictitious studies show that those who don't care about privacy, usually have not fully developed privacy awareness intelligence due to social constrictions nominally developed during the abstraction formance and concretion phase of the multi-hemispherical expansion of the brain. Often, this leads to higher overall social acceptance, integration, and adjustment- with loss of self awareness and self identity,giving over completely to the social hive mind indications and constructs, usually producing characteristics similiar to, but not nearly as developed as, the common bee, with hyponitic driven intelligence and pre-defined scripted actions produced from the social feedback loop of the group. Privacy is then regards as a trivial concept, as the social feedback never identifies individual self actions, rather group activity motions to accomplish group goals, not individual self goals. Integration of personal self into the hive is almost impossible because to be part of the hive one must sacrifice the self and individualism , conversely, the hive cannot exist as a individual only a selfless group of commonality- it cannot bee otherwise.(please forgive the pun)
I don’t think that people disagreeing with you is a failure of social media. If you walk into a bar in an area where HN readers tend to live (San Fran, NYC, Seattle, Austin, Denver, Chicago) you would likely get a similar response.
Well...
I'm using the same extension in VS Code, and I find the experience rather... meh. It works, it makes VS Code usable, but if you're accustomed to the performance of the real Vim, it's still underwhelming (especially if you're used to macros).
At least you can choose the government...
You're probably not getting a lot of feedback because you can't see anything without giving your email.

Anyways, if you're in the EU you could build a sizeable business helping people to get funds. Can easily charge a few k $ per application.

And btw just looking at the country counts it's pretty obvious the data is very incomplete, probably better off focusing on a particular geography.
No! Im still lovin’ Firefox:-)
*More viable way to distribute JavaScript compute?
Quitting smoking is pretty easy, all you need to do is whatever you were doing already, except smoking cigarettes. Not allowing people to smoke is not cruel and not harmful. In fact, allowing people to smoke is cruel and harmful. The only debatable part is if people should be allowed to harm themselves by smoking.
My experience with writing assembler is the same. The run-try-correct sequence encourages trying things until it seems to work.

The best code I wrote was in assembly language. I'd divide the code into blocks with comments. Each comment would document the expected state at that point, what the block would do, and the state after that block.

I wrote pages and pages in my noteblock, and while not everything was bug-free most of it was, and I have never experienced such a nice development process. Nowadays I have to consult five coworkers to ask how to call their undocumented methods and initialize the classes.

I have recently encountered the book 'Toward Zero-defect Programming', where exactly this approach is recommended. Key points are (from the top of my head):

1. You should know the programming language you're using inside-out.
2. Don't *try* your code, but *reason* about it, and comment/document this reasoning.
3. Do group reviews of the code and try to find holes in the reasoning, and problems with the code.
Sure. Searching a bit, they did benchmark against BoltDB, but didn't try what you're suggesting. The benchmark I found is also prior to them adding transactions to Badger.

Edit: Actually, the benchmarks turn off sync writes, which makes them silly to me. If you're okay with losing data, you probably wouldn't have chosen a disk based kv store. https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger-bench/blob/master/rw-ben...

The default install has sync writes turned on, so why benchmark it differently?
Why would it? That's not evidence of a trust, nor is there any legal requirement to pass on any amount of profit.
It is worth considering that we've gone through several moral panics about "hacking," particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That's why computer crime laws are so disproportionate (e.g. spray paint a physical sign get a $100 fine, vandalize a digital sign get five-ten years in prison). They were written when a bunch of ignorant lawmakers were freaking out about hackers turn off electricity or wiping out the stock market.
I don't understand why I got a downvote... I'm really excited about cloudflare workers and hope they will overcome the actual limitations to make them usable for more use cases (including mine, this is why I have provided my metrics as a hint to cloudflare team)
That would result in a much larger payload, and a payload size that is variable depending on how long it has been, and how much audio was record-able between requests. But if instead we observe a small payload of constant size given the same request, regardless of how long between requests, then we can reasonably be assured the device is not doing this.
My (off the cuff) theory is they want the money to stay in the banks and the reason is the same as for them getting rid of large denomination bills to make the friction of holding cash higher. Can't really recapitalize the banks if everyone has their money on some blockchain or in their mattresses.
Made me think of Brian Kernighan, another Unix guy who’s still kicking and quite engaging. Googling their names together brought up the fact that the two authored a 1999 book named “The Practice of Programming”, and then -$30 from my wallet for the impulse buy.
We are the minority at this point.
Mastering Data Structures in Ruby – Binary Trees
Oh, they are. On the other hand, maybe, if you keep the device long enough, it's not too bad.

Here's my present life. I bought a System76 laptop about this time last year. I wanted to get away from Mac OS since Eclipse is terrible on it (shortcut-wise). I prefer Linux, as long as it just works. System76 offers that. Now the System76 battery is down to 90% of life after moderate use. My Late 2013 MBP is down to its 80% life after 4 year, the battery swells a bit, but still stays on longer and charges quicker than the System76.

Maybe on the whole the price is valid.