skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting better at pitching
I speak really fast; not because I’m nervous, but when I slow down, I forget what I wanted to say next.

I applied to W19 last year and after we found out that we were invited to meet and interview in person, I wanted to do something to be better prepared at the inperson pitch.

I asked a few people if they would listen to me pitch or answer some basic questions like, what are you working on.

I shared the points and content I wanted to cover beforehand.

The feedback was consistent - “slow down, we didn’t understand half the stuff you said”

So I put together a tool that would listen to me as I practiced and it would figure out what I said. I used it to enunciate better (when I didn’t it wouldn’t pick up what I said), get better at pacing my words, and help verbalize content around keywords.

It’s basically a console app, but as I’m gearing up for to apply for S19 - I wanted to see if this would be useful to others.... I’ve slowly started converting it to a web app and have a bit more work to go before it’s usable by others.
A new technique for testing: distribution testing
I use mailchimp but probably could get away with plain old email (I have about 45 subscribers). I just use the HTML editor that mailchimp provides and write some inline CSS. It's all "handcrafted" which is what I want. Hope this helps :)

I will say that their free tier (I think it's 10k emails per month?) is way more than enough for my use case. I'm not affiliated with mailchimp.
Dell XPS13, running Debian testing. Works like a charm. Except for the proprietary finger print reader. Oh well.
Lenovo ThinkPad T480s. Switched after using Apple products for around 15 years. Running Windows 10. Love it.
TV has stuff like Broadcast Standards & Practices, which functions to keep its content within a certain envelope.

YouTube does not. YouTube just cares about what gets people to watch and watch and watch. YouTube will happily feed you endless rants about white ethnostates if that's what meets its criteria for "creating engagement".
I think someone wrote an HN email digest. You could get a weekly email with top posts that week ... I don't recall the name
Yes obviously you need to know what a group is to even begin ring theory but ring theory looks and feels nothing like group theory.
Capitalists will want your capital (attention). Up to you to defend it.

My fellows :

- ublock

- firefox block all trackers

- ghostery block all

- remove all notifications

- remove facebook

- do not engage with social media except professionally

- stick to long read forms of entretainment (HN enters this category with no video nor images)

my only curse is whatsapp that i use both personally and professionally
Yes, but that package could also do all sorts of other things, like encrypting your ~ and demanding ransom. It's not Wayland's problem to solve this - sandboxing is a separate matter. Wayland makes it easier to sandbox graphical applications but it is not a complete sandboxing solution.
You Can Save a Bicyclist’s Life – “Dutch Reach”
What if another process calls fsync? It will get the error. Then when LMDB calls fsync no error will be reported. And thus the transaction will not be retried.
Is this scenario dealt with?
Honestly it would be simpler just to make the "mark clean on write error" behavior a tunable flag rather than try to finesse this. Having the block layer not starve the system on bad hardware as a default behavior seems correct to me.
Do they ever stop? What does a surgeon do in their free time?
The need for a huge step is partly caused by your assumption that non-human animals and pre-linguistic humans don’t/didn’t have self-consciousness. Drop that assumption then only language is missing and you don’t need two new things at once.
An increase in amyloids will be observed any time cells are malfunctioning for whatever reason.

They are the most thermodynamically stable structure that polypeptides can form, and require constant housekeeping to prevent. Accumulation of amyloids is like failing to taking out the trash in your house.

Afaik, there has never been a disease state checked for amyloids that failed to be associated with them (heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc).

>"From a wide range of in vitro experiments on peptides and proteins we now know that the formation of amyloid structures is not a rare phenomenon associated with a small number of diseases but rather that it reflects a well-defined structural form of the protein that is an alternative to the native state — a form that may in principle be adopted by many, if not all, polypeptide sequences

[...]

These observations, therefore, have led to the remarkable conclusion that, at the concentrations present in living systems, the native states may not always represent the absolute free energy minima of the corresponding polypeptide chains — the native form of a protein could in some cases simply be a metastable monomeric (or functionally oligomeric) state that is separated from its polymeric amyloid form by high kinetic barriers" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24854788

I've previously commented the same thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14914528#14917057

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amyloid%20nonbel&sort=byPopula...
Ok... and the US population is expected to grow more than that over the same time period. Not sure I see your point here.
It depends what "beginner" means -- what's your level of sophistication? Are you a budding mathematician or just an interested programmer?
As is pretty clear from the linked Vox article, the proposed solutions for largely nonexistent voter fraud would have zero impact on this sort of election fraud.
If I had youtube or facebook I would make different recommendation engines and let people choose one. This should stop the complaining
Yeah, I send out memes (a lot of screenshots from twitter and tumblr, honestly) and content from imgur/reddit. I curate the content and send it to people who are interested in that kind of thing. It's obvs not for everyone but I have subscribers that seem to enjoy it :)

I also sometimes send out essays about things I've been thinking about. My last email had about 1k words about millennials (I am one, ftr) and what the media was saying about my generation.

It's not for everyone but that's something I enjoy about the email newsletter medium - you can always unsubscribe.
The real lesson learned: rather than actually fixing the problems with your algorithm, just manually block stuff out...

People do the same thing too with chatbots. If you have a text file with a list of bad words the bot isn’t allowed to say, it’s not really cutting-edge AI is it.
"This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter"

http://antirez.com/news/82

I can't see how people use Twitter for anything more than shouting into the ether at each other. It's just so messy and rambly if you try.
The rising Western skyline: Western cityscapes are becoming tall and sleek
I would argue that company-specific historical knowledge is not the value you (et al) are bringing. The value is the soft-skills of effective leadership that distinguish Principal from Senior (to use the article's parlance). Successfully transferring this to another company is an exercise in knowing how to demonstrate and sell those skills. And, of course, in finding a company and an interview panel that understands their value.

Anyone worth their salt should realize that the long-term value of technical leadership far eclipses the short-term value of knowing what happened that one time we tried switching from Technology A to Technology B. (And unless you've completely purged your engineering department, such institutional knowledge is there to be queried.)
I find the opposite.

Brilliant writers like Corey Robin have no problem whatsoever using the platform effectively, often screenshotting longer thoughts. Sanders and AOC also good examples of puncturing, efficient communication.

the big losers are PR-types, and blowhards like Sam Harris, who are robbed of their smarmy techniques of soothing and ensnaring the reader with a lot of fluff and verbiage and rhetorical hedging and weasel wording.

when you're trying to express a thought clearly, or link to an essay, the platform works really well.

it works less well when your entire thesis is that nobody knows what they're doing, that people shouldn't take strong positions on topics, and that little people should sit down and listen to their superiors. cause on twitter the replies exist on the same level and status as famous-people-content, and so lots of emperors get exposed pretty ruthlessly
Almost certainly. Medical professionals of the future will look at today’s cutting edge med tech the way we view blood-letting and balancing out the body’s humours.
Actually, as a mechanical engineer at a consumer products startup, I would have appreciated this clarification.
I for one would very much like to see this bug in 18.04 fixed as a priority:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openjdk-lts/+bug/1...

The Java 11 package installs Java 10. This was supposed to be a short term hack (because Ubuntu's long term supported version 18.04 was being released shortly before Java's long term supported version 11) but it's been a good while now - six months or so.

The short term support version 18.10 of Ubuntu has Java 11 so it's very non-obvious what the blocker is.

To me this seems like a really poor choice. The result of installing the Java 11 package but getting Java 10 clearly fails the principle of least astonishment. If we can live without the fix a quarter of the way to the next LTS edition of Ubuntu then we could have lived with Java 10 as the preferred (and correctly named) package in the first place.

Meanwhile the bug asks us not to spam with requests for updates yet there's no suggestion of where we can go to gauge what the timescales we're up against are.

It definitely dents my confidence in Ubuntu as a well organised distribution.
Response to the Bank Chairman
The difference is usually in terms of negotiating details about the budget & resources you’ll have when you join, your own much larger severance package or equity package with acceleration provisions, etc.

Based on the degree of resources they put into you at a director level, the option is disallowed for other people to fail to work constructively to onboard your new ideas / approaches.

Definitely still may not work out, but it’s a different ballgame than a high level engineering hire, which (however foolish) many companies will still view like they are sweetening some pot just with the title and don’t have any plans to honor the agreed nature of the role.
interesting. in SoCal there are a lot of urban citrus trees growing amongst the houses and apartments, including Valencia oranges. most of the time, the oranges are a bit on the tart side, but there are some sweet ones here and there. IDK what makes the difference. maybe sun exposure on the tree, or more cold weather in a given year. in any case, i'm surprised at how many go to waste.

... which leads to my question: what happened with all the citrus greening disease in Florida? i heard it had destroyed a lot of trees. have they found a good way to combat that?
> Think about how you treat people on your way up, because you will meet them again on the way down.

That’s an incredible saying. It really encapsulates the “fall from grace” that a lot of celebrities experience. Never saw it put in a way that would relate it to my life. Thanks for sharing!
IMO this is a bug to users of twitter, but a feature to twitter the for profit company. It encourages fuzzy communication, and usually the least charitable interpretations.

Basically it's tailored to push your emotional button.
I hope YouTube (and Google as a whole) are applying these changes to all content. If they are specifically altering the behavior for only certain content (e.g. flat earth videos), I think that raises some serious red flags. I don't want YouTube to be the arbiters of what people watch based on their compass, which is going to have an obvious bias.

The reality is that almost all online platforms are driven by user behavior. If those user behaviors lead to relationships between videos that drive recommendations, then that should be respected. Who is YouTube to say that's bad? However, if the quality of recommendations is skewed by one group of heavy users (i.e. it is being gamed), they could consider tweaking how much weight is given to such users and apply it across the board. That is, they need to apply such changes not just to 'conspiracy theory' videos but also to things like political videos from the left (and the right), which surely experience the same skew in recommendations from a minority of users.

An aside: some comments here seem to say that YouTube should keep this content but 'stop promoting it'. Well not recommending content is in effect the same as censoring it outright. If an order of magnitude fewer users find some content, the net impact is the same.
I think it's an interesting comment. I wonder if the average person spends less time watching reruns compared to the 70s/80s/90s. There certainly was a cultural push to not be a "couch potato", and I wonder if we'll see that again with internet entertainment.
I'm using Wayland and love it and what it represents for the future of Linux. Desktop security is more important than supporting NVIDIA's hostile products.

Thanks for your work on wlroots and other software I've enjoyed. I imagine I'll be switching to sway soon as well. There was something preventing me from adopting it yet but I can't remember what it was. I believe it was on the roadmap though.

I'm glad you posted this article because my new year's initiative is to donate to a couple dozen FOSS projects and you definitely deserve some of that.
Oregon is vote by mail, statewide. It's much nicer!
As a newsletter guy myself (see https://tedium.co/), one that focuses less on link lists and more on longer-form storytelling, I look at email as a vessel that helps lessen the effect of the platform on the creative outlet. It's one of many, but still a vessel. If you read my content in your inbox, great! If you want it on the web, it's there, too. In your feed (https://feed.tedium.co/)? You can have it there, too. I'll even syndicate it. My only limitation is that it's something that I can control the distribution of, not Facebook or Twitter or Medium. Maybe I'll share the content on those platforms, but I won't let it be my primary vessel.

I think, ultimately, this is the benefit I see of the newsletter mechanism—it's the ability to control your destiny as a writer and distributor. We simply do not allow for enough of that in this platform-driven era. So let's minimize the platforms.

After an era in which platforms have had so much control, it's great to see writers figure out that there are ways around all that. Kudos to Craig, Tim Carmody, and other writers that have been willing to put this kind of work into their business models.
Unfortunately, that doesn't help me against the consequences of others not using such defences.
Why do you want to learn category theory?
I made a choice early on in my newsletter that I don't publish them anywhere. If you weren't subscribed when I sent it out, you miss it. I think that's a cool piece of email newsletters - there's not necessarily an endless archive.

Er, that said, I think it's good to do archives for useful emails like yours. Mine is just memes which go stale pretty quickly :)
Later article from the BBC contradicting this one:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47191952
Regarding gaming by the way. XWayland works quite well for it already (it's critical since Wine for example still requires X and many older games depend on X as well), but there seems to be some issue with radv at present which requires setting explicit number of back buffers to avoid capping that disregards vsync settings:

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806

If games are using SDL, you can also select Wayland using SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. But there are some glitches still. I tried doing it for example with ScummVM, and it produced double cursor.
The relentless force of 'job title inflation' ensures there will be levels above Principal. (For instance, some organizations have 'Senior Principal'.)

This is necessary because there are different grades of programmers. Frankly, some are better than others and social pressures force us to acknowledge it in some way.

It's been this way as long as I remember, one of the first things I was issued at my first programming shop was a chart that enumerated who was an entry-level 'E07', who were mid-level 'E08s and E09s' and who had reached the coveted rank of 'E10'. The groupings will probably be similar no matter where you go, though the titles will change.

I think it's a natural workplace dynamic.
If I made a ticking clock out of wood but at the heart of it one gear was made out of metal and put it across the room from a large magnetic source which I could slowly increase the magnetism on.. would that be an apt metaphor for time dilation..?

Is the slowing down of time just simply the fact that all matter has some sort of core weight that has more/less friction when under the pressure of gravity?
I don't agree that just because some content is in Reddit's database that they "own" it, but let's set that aside for a moment.

Even if we allow that Reddit owns all content in its database absolutely, they are also making an implicit representation that what is in the database is what the user actually typed. A poll of all reddit users asking "do you expect what is shown to be what the user typed?" will come up "Yes".

I imagine the outrage felt by those reddit users is not for this violation, which is small in scope, but for the realization that reality can be changed out from under them, and the uncertainty about that power asymmetry being used against them.
It should make no difference to an existing installation. The point releases to LTS really just mean that the installer images are kept up to date.
Try telling a homeless Veteran that it was worth $20 billion to prove the Higgs mechanism. We could house 400,000 homeless for that price.
PostmarketOS at FOSDEM 2019
Exactly my thought. May be even better is to have it included in the next version of Turbolinks.
Surrrrrrprise!
Oh, that's super cool. I write my newsletter emails in markdown, change them to HTML, and then publish them on mailchimp (which is a bit overkill for my 45 subscribers). Definitely going to check this out!
also not to forget the insecticide residues on the oranges themselves
React’s Hooks in 5 Minutes
I suspect it's missing details, but I think this can be implemented in a fairly trustworthy way, using technology as an aid, but not the primary record of the election.

I think in a previous topic on HN, someone described his experience in one of the states way better. I'm describing what I remember, which may not be completely accurate:

You take the paper ballots, and you split them into lots. Each lot is passed through at-least two voting counter machines, and a recount is triggered if either machine produces a different result. Random lots are manually hand counted, to ensure they produce the same results as the voting machines.

To me, this makes the electronic counting extremely tamper resistant, as tampering with a subset of machines will very likely produce a discrepancy against other machines that is detectable. Or if the entire fleet of machines has been tampered with, this becomes apparent with the manual counts.

As for the machine at the poll, the initial scan can just be a best practice, that before the ballot is submitted can indicate to the voter if the ballot scans OK, leaving an opportunity to correct.

Of course, this is just on the counting side, all sorts of additional best practices are needed to ensure the paper ballots are transported securely, aren't lost or tampered with, are stored securely if a recount is needed, etc. And each step has scrutineers, even if the polling station is in someone's garage.
Or vote buying.
I'm not seeing any difference, appart from the fact independent contractor's minimum wage in the US is 0$

DoorDash says, you are paid 0$, but get to keep 100% of the tips. And it says, if you are tipped less then 10$, they'll pay out the difference so you are guaranteed to make a minimum of 10$ per job, with the max uncapped, left to your tip potential.

This seems identical to me. Waiters are paid (2.13$ per hour + tip) or 7.95$ per hour if it adds up to less then that. Drivers are paid (0$ per job + tip) or 10$ per job if it adds up to less then that.
The challenge with that kind of system is flow control. Essentially everything is coupled by queues without a feedback loop. And once the system gets under load, those queues might run fuller and fuller until the whole system fails.

It’s actually similar than an in-program model where you just asynchronously queue void functions in threadpools without knowing how many actually run.

The fact that you are only running on top of managed services and that AWS can scale really well might mitigate the problem. And if you have to process all events and can not fail early or move backpressure on the initial caller there might not really be a better solution anyway. But you should be aware about it.
I didn't found higher birth rates for any of the phase (split into quarters)
> I am not sure if the title of "staff/principle" can be transferred

It depends on how you got to be a principal. If you fell into the role because of accumulated knowledge and promotions, probably not. If you are self-driven, work to achieve complete knowledge of your company's products and technologies, push for high standards, and can transfer knowledge well to others...yes.
Thanks, make sense, I think Postgres are planning go have pluggable storage interface in nest version 12, would that help?
Also nobody has mention data checksum added v9.3, do you know if this helps avoid this kind of fsync related corruption?
Definitely. Rails is great as a starting point. By the time a product/company has started to 'outgrow' it then of course migrating away might make sense and there'll more than likely be a large enough team at the time to do the migration.

A bit of YAGNI is clear here.
Lighting up my DasKeyboard with Blood Sugar changes using my body's REST API
I never understood this complains? The main use cases work, I have almost never found a Linux user that was unhappy with Wayland. Once a while a power user, but that one is smart enough to install X if he needs a special functionality.

I never had a problem, and if you upgrade the next time, check the hardware compatibility and buy what you need. Till then, just run a X stack.
People who leave your company may poach you some day, so continue your quality work and keep in touch with them. That is called networking.
The Request Lifecycle
Thank you for the simple description of this. I've struggled to describe what I enjoy (and like to believe I'm good at).
Nice argument
Can you believe it, I opened this up and Ctrl+F'ed 'sophon' to see if I'd be the first one. Glad to see someone else beat me to it.
Err.. Definitely ask a doctor first, but after I would ask if you turn pale after simply eating that amount of oranges
Functional analysis shows up all over the place. Everywhere you can take a Fourier transform, you can use functional analysis. For robotics, control theory and computer vision both come to mind.
Their full mission is "We're reinventing the browser as a user-first platform for speed, privacy, better ads, and beyond
", therefore I guess this is for a "better ads" ;-)
My current showstopper with Wayland is that no screensharing application works with it: Skype, Meet, TeamViewer. I need them to work with my customers so I'm staying on Xorg until that gets implemented.