skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yoshi's Island is one of the best platformers ever, and I still get the music in my head regularly. The most recent game that that had a similar, rare combination of great gameplay and amazing soundtrack has been Celeste.
> she and her software engineer husband
How to Be a Producer in a Nation of Consumers
I suppose the word "bubble" might be problematic, since the term implies that once it stops growing, it will shrink dramatically. But, I'm not sure the government has an ever-growing ability to increase student loans, and the forgiveness programs are turning out (10 years on) not to result in much forgiveness.

I have heard it said that indebtedness in student loans is interfering with the ability of many to take out loans for cars or houses, in other words, getting too much debt from the government to get any from the private sector. I don't like banks all that much, but I think they are politically powerful, and if they perceive student loans as impinging on their ability to make money, I would think they would get something done to change the situation.

Who has more powerful lobbyists, universities or banks? Both way more powerful than I am, but I would not bet on universities.
How do you manage this conflict?

I think a lot of us suffer from this at different scales. I've always found it difficult to work on things that will pay off in the future, even if I plan something I just don't seem to be able to carry through a long term project to the end unless I'm in an environment where there's accountability such as deadlines on projects at work.

I'm very prone to instant gratification, which is why I can easily lose most of my spare time in video games, netflix, youtube etc.
println will lock stdout for the duration of its work, yes. You can lock once before and use write! instead.
Speaking of low voltage, high power systems - we refine alumina around here; the ovens run on 4,7V/200kA.

That makes for some quite impressive feeders!
If you're Microsoft-sized, then if anything, your interview process should be less strict, not more strict. At organizational scale, enforcement processes become more important than culture. That means building out custom standardized entrance exams, regular "induction days" with mandatory internal courses for new hires (wherein it is your job in the first few weeks or even months to just go to those courses during normal working hours), deployment pipelines which guide new junior hires by enforcing minimum test coverage, style conventions, passing static code analysis, etc.

Your hiring needs should reflect the size of your organization, and your hiring process should reflect your hiring needs. If you hire relatively infrequently then it makes sense to go over individual resumes and have infrequent evening interviews. If you need to hire hundreds of people this month just to negate churn then you have the resources to build out the kind of enforcement-process-oriented above since you surely need that kind of infrastructure anyway. Everything in between is just a matter of degree and where your company is on the process-vs-culture balance as a function of its size.
Yeah, this was my thought as well.

I'm fairly certain the article may be poorly worded. Certainly standard JPGs are decoded on the CPU side as well, are they not?

To the best of my knowledge, I don't think any browsers are doing JPG decoding in hardware; I think they use the GPU for primitives and compositing, etc.

I would look forward to being corrected if I'm wrong!
I think housing costs are a big part of this. Things are almost perfectly stacked in favour of current property owners: oppose any new housing development near you which keeps land prices and rents high, while those wanting to buy or rent can’t or don’t vote and can’t as easily encourage more building as current owners can discourage it.

And it’s so simple (not easy, but simple) too: build more to reduce housing costs which is effectively a raise for most people. We’d need to stop treating housing as a primary investment vehicle though.
If you're a hipster in a major city near fiber, sure, it all works great. For the rest of us, no, daily failures are the reality.
Hardly surprising. JPEG is a very mature technology with deep support and optimizations going all the way to hardware support built into many (most?) cpus. If the real world savings are ~ 20%, it probably won't be worth it.
when engineers don’t prioritize future-proof readability

What does it say about the competence of "future" engineers if they can't understand code written by past ones?

One of my favourite sayings is "the code is unreadable to you, because you are not qualified to understand it yet". Perhaps we should not encourage the degradation of our craft.
In terms of compression, AV1 is a clear win. Note that artifacts that bother you are at about half the file size. You can increase the quality and still have an image that is both nicer and smaller than JPEG and WebP.

However, as TFA mentions, better compression is currently a double-edged sword, because the CPU has become a bottleneck again: even top-of-the-line Android phones have weak Qualcomm CPUs, and sites use so much JavaScript that even high-end machines can struggle.

So we may end up living with JPEG for a few more years. This format has been designed when CPUs had 25Mhz, and we've had over 25 years to optimize the implementations, so we get a lot of bang for the buck from it.
Plans to learn a new tech skill in 2019? What you need to know
Agreed - it's awesome. More tips - if you have to do payroll (T4s) then try out Payment Evolution. The interface is rubbish but it's cheap, easy, and fairly automatic.

Also - we moved to Plooto for paying contractors - they email folks as the money moves between stages. It's cut down on the background admin side of 'when will this land'.
Oh, I'm just kibitzing from across the Atlantic. But it doesn't really matter what people are like socially - I'm sure there are nice Republicans and there is a subset of Democrat machine politics people I would no doubt regard as awful if I met them - it matters what the actual policy enacted and its effects are.
> They don't believe other governments actually don't have influence over the judiciary

This doesn't strike me as a reasonable generalization. It implies too much stupidity. I think Mr Putin and Mr Xi are well educated and have a grasp of how the world works well beyond what we lay people think we know.
From the executive summary of the Federal Reserve report linked in the article:

>When asked about their finances, 74 percent of
adults said they were either doing okay or living
comfortably in 2017—over 10 percentage points
more than in the first survey in 2013.

>Individuals of all education levels have shared in
the improvement over the past five years, though
the more educated still report greater well-being
than those less educated.

>Three in five urban residents describe the economy
in their local community as good or excellent ver-
sus two in five rural residents who offer this posi-
tive of an assessment of local conditions.

Etc. Far less bleak when one focuses on the whole picture. But don't let that stop wapo et al. from implicating Trump while trotting out predictable sob stories about people who spent half their lives pursuing 3 uneconomical degrees, had 3 more kids than they could afford, in cities with some of the highest costs of living in the world, and now complain that they're living paycheck to paycheck.

I'm getting really tired of the agenda based fear mongering by wapo, huffpo, and the like. Trust in media is rightly at an all time low[1].

1.https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/10-reasons-why-...
Fred Wilson: What Happened in 2018
> instead take positions that pay 60k-70k. Even with tenure, that's a labor of love.

Not to say academics don't take a pay cut compared to industry, but at least in CS $60k-$70k is very low for a tenure track position. Here's a good indication of where salaries are in CS: https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2017-Taulbee-Surv...

$90k (9 month salary) is the bottom 10th percentile for a starting assistant professor in CS. $200k (9 month) is the 90th percentile for a full professor with 16+ years.

This obviously varies by school and region, but $60k-$70k is what you would expect for an instructor at a very low rank school, which is not a position PhDs from top universities would be applying for.
Bringing previously hard working people back into work is hugely benefitial to society.
No, but not because Aristotle was against observation. Just because he either miscounted or trusted a wrong earlier observation. What he wrote is:

"”Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals _observations have not yet been made_”

Emphasis mine.
What you want is gopher[1]. Instead of AMP I think sites could honor requests with an text/plain header, the issue is monetization.
But AMP is for content based sites, SPA capture a completely different use cases.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Traffic Sign Classification Again
If you use the right sort of kernel for an SVM it becomes a neural network with automatic architecture derivation.

See slide 7:

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~magdon/courses/LFD-Slides/SlidesLect2...
Looking for open source QA tool?
Hello,

At work, wwe have a list of manual scenario (hundreds) that have to be manually executed every 4 months; at the moment, we are using an google sheet document that we are cloning each time.

Is there a proper tool that would allow us to do this automatically and by chance that would allow us to automatically open tickets in our ticketing system youtrack (thats maybe a bit much to ask :))

Thanks a lot!
I would consider scuttlebutt to be federated as well, since it’s difficult to communicate to other users without a pub server
The government does the same thing with SS. If you pass away before collecting benefits, those benefits aren't passed on to those who inherit your estate.
Lots of Kafka + Cassandra out there looking for a replacement. I wonder if this is the one.
That really echoes with me. Great that you are making improvement.
I've hired about half a dozen ML engineers/architects in the past six months. Several of them have EE backgrounds. There's a good bit of ML that touches on hardware (think integrated cameras and similar) so it can be really helpful.

You're mostly on track with your plan to build something. You do need to demonstrate that you have the skill set, but building one giant thing isn't the answer. There's so much that goes into building a giant thing, that I can't accurately access your ML skills.

Ideally I like to see a lot of small things over a reasonable amount of time. Someone with a solid GitHub showing 6-12 months of paper implementations, weekend geez-wiz hacks and various other projects would go right to the top of my call back list.

Hope that helps, good luck with the job search.
In the US and Europe consumption is declining. Globally the growth of consumption is declining. Additionally, the US is now (recent estimations) the global dominant exporter of oil recently surpassing Russia. These trends break all traditional projections and are largely due to shifting energy consumption as a result of technological innovation and continued investment in the energy sector. Since the new trends are independent of market demand for oil, as demand for energy overall continues to climb, these new trends may well continue until killed by economic demand such that there is more oil available than people are willing to consume and store.

* https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/the-surprising-declin...

* http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2014/07/10/world-sets-new...
Is everyone just supposed to be as smart as us programmers? Is it peoples' own fault if they're stupid? Do they deserve no sympathy or humanity?

Right now I make $13/hr in an expensive city. I'm working to find a software job, but the people I work with... they don't have anything else. They're just happy to hold down a steady job. How do you suggest these people magically gain the intelligence and/or self-control/self-discipline and free time and knowledge of a solid path to improve their situation? Because they sure as shit can't afford to go to nursing school, but do they even know what to type into google to start teaching themselves marketable skills?

I feel bad for people like you who lack empathy to such a degree. Just literally disconnected from such a large portion of humanity.
I enjoy a nice red wine or a nice liquor in moderation. But I don’t drink beer or cheap alcohol.

I’m drinking for the tastes so I don’t care to get drunk or drink lousy stuff.

Why do you ask?
Defined benefit pension plans create a huge moral hazard and are just too risky for employees, employers, and taxpayers alike. As a society we should be aggressively phasing out pensions and replacing them with defined contribution plans like 401(k) and 403(b). That way each employee's retirement funds are in an individual named account held by a brokerage and can't be taken away. Even if your employer goes bankrupt, everything already deposited in your account is still yours.
Is it the difficulty of finding meaningful and well-paying work today? Or the lack of empathy from their fellow humans?
Like the old saying goes, "feudalism with extra steps".
I think the very fact that people in wildly different circumstances are living paycheck to paycheck is a huge flag that this isn't as simple a problem as "they don't get paid enough".

Income and expenses are intricately linked by psychology. It's almost irrelevant what your paycheck is, if you're prone to this problem then somehow expenses will always rise to meet it.

If expenses weren't actually determined by paycheck, the number of people living paycheck to paycheck would be a really small number. Everyone else would either be building a surplus each month or going further into debt.
As someone who didn't learn the very basics of personal finance at the optimal point in life, I feel like it should be part of our standardized education. I'd like to think that would make things at least marginally better.

Another thing I'd love to see, would be for banks to fundamentally reorient themselves to be their customer's advocates/financial guardians, instead of being yet another party encouraging people to borrow more than they ought to. Wishful thinking, I know. My bank knows how much I make, it knows how often I get paid, it knows how much I spend and on what - they have all the info they need to develop a plan to ensure my financial security and advise me where I can do better. Why don't they and why isn't it a standard part of opening account(s)? I'd love to see more innovation around encouraging proper saving habits and budgeting, like what simple.com is doing - but it needs to go even farther than what they currently have, IMHO.
This issue is almost the same issue I had when I had an outage that took down the internet connection for a local govt I worked at.

The issue was a single bad port on a switch about 3 hours away. It took two days of downtime for them to figure it out.

Now the place I work at just deals with having fibre cut 2-3 hours away and losing a days worth of work for it. At least now I don't have to rely on insiders to tell me what actually is going on. But Centurylink does offer a 4g service for backup connections....

I'm not surprised at all with this. Business as usual for Centurylink.
Ahh yeah, using `..(z + 1)` makes it run faster than the C++ version.
They don't give a shit about their people. We do. That's not going to end well.
> should I vote Democrat, Republican or Independent?

You should vote in your jurisdictions’ meaningful primaries, get involved with campaigns and causes that represent you and organise like-minded citizens.
I would argue both. Systems like Bootstrap still get a lot of flak
Well, that seems more like an issue with the compiler then, cause avoiding overflows would not result in a 2x slow-down in C or C++.
The Moon makes sense - we've only got one, it's a much smaller search area, and iirc, it started actively broadcasting after a certain point.

The outer solar system is a huge search area.

It's the difference between your mailman leaving a package on your porch, or somewhere in Canada.
The list has two purposes: fallback in case a particular font doesn't exist on the client, and fallback in case a particular glyph doesn't exist in the font. When you use emoji that aren't in the sans-serif font, it'll fall back to the listed emoji fonts for that individual glyph.
I agree with this and that is why we are focusing on funding our child's 529 account to the max without endangering our retirement.
True. That is a nice feature.
> They don't give a shit about their people

Beijing doesn’t care about the average Chinese. But its elites? It cares as much as any other government.
Sometimes, the trick there is that compilers can be really good at compile time stuff, and the whole computation may just be computed at compile time. In this case? Probably not. But it's not always the right way to do a benchmark, or at least, without some tweaks.
Ports operate a different layer in the OSI model - the transport layer, not the network layer (which IP operates on). Ports are TCP and UDP concepts (e.g., a different application can bind to TCP port 443 than UDP port 443, as they're essentially different ports). Some protocols don't have ports at all, e.g., ICMP, which instead has a "type".
Somewhere we went wrong when coming up with this idea of online harassment.

People are going to say mean things to other people. This is never going to change.

The solution is simple. If somebody is saying something you don't like then don't visit their site. If it is in a platform then block them and or set your profile to only interact with a white list. If they say something as fact about you that is not true, sue them, we already have the laws for this stuff. But most importantly stop worrying about what somebody else says to you online.

People have a duty to police their own online content. Nobody should be telling me what I can and can't look at on the internet (please don't take that out of context of laws)

Universities are not our parents.
The basic idea I like is, take x^2 + y^2 = z^2, but divide by z^2 to get (x/z)^2 + (y/z)^2 = 1. Now you're looking for the rational points on the unit circle. An important observation is that any two rational points define a line with rational slope. You know of one such rational point on the unit circle, say, (-1, 0). Now you can invert this process and pick a line with rational slope that goes through (-1,0). All lines with rational slope going through (-1,0) will hit another rational point on the circle, so you've found all rational points on the circle by this method, which include all primitive Pythagorean triples.

When you work out this math, you recover the classical parametrisation, where the slope m/n of the line corresponds to the parameters, and this line-intersection method is a good inspiration for how to do the same with some higher-order curves such as elliptic curves, where it leads to the group law on them.
> “What does it say about the competence of "future" engineers if they can't understand code written by past ones?”

It doesn’t say much about those future engineers at all.

It’s easy to write inscrutable code that even veteran engineers can’t understand, yet still “gets the job done.”

Also, you act like this would imply that all future engineers are the same, but that is not true and not related to my points.

You’re writing code for the inexperienced future engineer, some poor soul tossed into a legacy codebase without much help. It’s not their fault they were put in that position. It’s sink or swim. Good code helps _that_ person swim.

As for the quote you mention,

> “One of my favourite sayings is "the code is unreadable to you, because you are not qualified to understand it yet".

That is a horrible way of thinking, with built in condescending attitudes and everything. If code is unreadable to someone, beyond basic syntax definitions, that is the author’s fault and not at all the reader’s fault for being inexperienced.

The reason 5th graders can’t read Infinite Jest is because David Foster Wallace tried to make it complicated, not because, in some skewed perspective, the writing is perfectly simple but 5th graders just aren’t experienced enough yet. It’s a complexity property of the writing not of the reader’s brain.

With literature you can get away with this because there are extenuating arguments about artistic merit.

For business software, not so. In that case, if you write something more like DFW and less like Hemingway, it’s a sign of laziness and lack of self-discipline.. and not at all a sign of skill advancement.
All of those statistics appear to be feeling based and not actually grounded in any meaningful numbers.
I've never counted but I must have done way more than 300 interviews. I have interviewed at 3/5 of the FAANG.

Coding:
on a whiteboard or with someone watching over you has no correlation with performance on the job.

Data structures:
questions usually end up so contrite that they have no bearing to real-world situations. That or based on luck of seeing an remembering the right one. Data structures usually go hand in hand with algorithms.

Algorithms:
questions become more like trivia or reinventing something that has likely got research papers on it. Oh, you want me to invent an algorithm I've never heard of on a whiteboard with your clues?

System design and data modelling:
the kind of thing you can do in an interview lacks real-world data. No empiricism. It's all about the trade-offs.

Tailoring to the candidate introduces inconsistency and unfairness/luck.

What if these "seniors" and "architects" are frauds?! How else could they hold down a job for 20 years and not be able to answer my questions? They must be really bad!

Lucky my interview process is really great and I always hire the good ones. I track every rejection and I have proof that they never amount to anything!
Possibly! Remember that the Rust language and C/C++ have different semantics with regards to overflow. It may be the programmer's "fault" for not writing the code with the equivalent semantics (you can make them have the same semantics, but it's not the default).
>And they can work for less aka demand less because they don’t have the burden of student loans.

Depending on their country of origin, they also are comfortable with lower standards of living. Which puts negative pressure on wages.
onecore isn't really about the kernel, but the intermediate layers above it.
Six Degrees of YC Separation
I suspect (wildly guess, to be honest) that, like "cancer", "depression" (or even "Melancholic Major Depressive Disorder") is really a name we give to a collection of related diseases with similar symptoms. Teasing apart the various forms will likely improve treatment (and improve quality of studies).
Except when it is. Generalities aren't helpful to the single parent working retail. Expenses aren't always optional.
Sure, they understand. Then they disapprove and scoff that our leaders don't have the audacity to assert their will anyway.

And, in truth, as we've learned with Trump, in many cases they do because it's harder to undo or punish his actions as fast as he can keep doing things. When there are no clear rules for enforcing the rules, we lose.
Real estate is the way I broke this cycle. It was not a short term fix, it took 10 years. Living in and ultimately selling my condo and moving to an apartment netted me enough equity to pay off all my debts.

One year later, I've just finishing building a home, and have a 5-month emergency fund, and laugh at the idea of buying anything else at all on credit. A mortgage and nothing else.

I'd never have been able to do that paying all the monthly minimums on the debt I accrued in my 20s. It was money in, money out--money that was already spoken for.