skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is it a useful goal to not understand control theory?

Animals like us have plenty of control theory built into our firmware, even if we aren't going through the calculations on the cognitive software level.

A control system, tuned and running, is a few lines of code in a fast loop, or a feedback amplifier circuit. Just like a neural net, it takes a while to tune the coefficients but then it becomes muscle memory. And since much of control theory is fully general (like Bode's sensitivity integral), those principles must also hold for biological systems as well.

A baby doesn't think about Laplace transforms when learning to walk, but neither do they think about backpropagation.

If you're keen to replace control theory with something else, I recommend solidly understanding it first.
In practice, would it be easier to just randomly generate points within the bounding box of the radius, and then throw out any points that fall outside of the circle? Wouldn't work too well for the cases where you want points from some radius away, to some radius away, but would probably work well when you just want a random point inside of a given radius since only 1/4 of the points will have to be thrown out.
>The percentage that is straight, white, male and US born in my personal ex coworker network is probably around 20%.

If true, you have to realize you're an outlier. Statistically the industry is still predominately white and male even in silicon valley.
If you're competent enough to manage your digital security, you're fine (99% of the population isn't). If you're not, you're endangering the society you live in (by providing attackers with a device they can use). That's one way of looking at it.
The problems don't arise with individuals, but with groups. If you create a monoculture, it will be hostile to others that are not part of it.
> No. There is a huge difference between counting hours and counting weeks in terms of how much overhead it imposes on you, and how much opportunity it gives a client to nickel-and-dime.

> No. I'm saying charge time-based, but by the week rather than the hour: that is, do not quibble about the difference between 39 hours and 41 hours, and do not work for clients who want to.

Yeah but both of these things are what bad clients do, who we agree are weeded out (usually) with higher rates.

Also "not quibbling" about the difference between 39 and 40 hours means that there is an expected amount of hours you're supposed to be working -- how does that get set? Is the answer to just not talk about it? Why wouldn't a good conscientious client ask how much time you're dedicating to the project per week, if they find your per-week scopes to be lower than what they think could be done in their idea of a work-week?

To reiterate, I think the real kernel of advice here is "charge more to weed out bad clients", and the "charge by the week" to be a red herring. Charging more is doing the hard work here, weeding out clients that might attempt to micromanage, not changing to weekly billing. When businesses have enough headroom to not worry about whether they're maximally extracting value from you, that's when they don't care how long your work week is/what scope you set for a "week".

The legal profession seems to have no problem charging by the hour, why should we?
Electrical banana...
Is bound to be the very next phase...
They call me mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
Leaflet.BlurredLocation https://github.com/publiclab/leaflet-blurred-location - A Leaflet-based HTML interface for selecting a "blurred" or low-resolution location, to preserve privacy.

H3 is similar and cool, but this builds a similar nested grid concept around latitude/longitude, which can map to existing coordinate systems and database storage.

Also note that population density affects how effective a given precision "blur" is for an area; we're also hoping to develop a web service or library to roughly return population density for any given region of the globe.
They should focus on non-Electron client, and server in Go [1] rather than Python. Both are too slow and consume so much memory just for an IM.

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
You're supposing the government doesn't know you bought those bitcoins (or at the least doesn't know that you are somehow hiding a lot of money without knowing the details) and isn't willing to beat it out of you.

Most cryptoanarchists are deluded nerds who would fold in less than 5 minutes of waterboarding. Do you think these thugs who are willing to look up your ass for a few pieces of gold aren't willing to violate you in other ways? Of course you don't believe that, you've merely failed to seriously consider that possibility.

The only reason smuggling BTC sometimes works right now is because they're not looking for it.
I agree with you 100%, but I do have a bit of sympathy with the insistence that they want to verify that everyone can code and not just talk a good line.

I made the mistake of hiring someone quite senior through internal transfer once who was utterly and flagrantly unable to code despite the job saying this was a requirement - I probably could have caught this with a simple fizzbuzz, but felt like this would have been too insulting.

At at least some of the FAANGs it's also a pretty clear indication of the fact that you're going to get busted way down and work your way up. I was a Principal Engineer at Intel with a successful exit in a highly technical area, but I would be shocked if I wouldn't have to re-earn my stripes at most other companies. Most of the super-smart guys I know who went to Google, for example, got busted way down and quickly earned their way up.

So if we're not up to grinding and expect to go back in at a high level, maybe it's kinder to warn us off early. :-)
Thanks folks for the great links and articles related to the question - very helpful!
I too work in this regulated business, and don't think your argument holds unless you don't inventory your dependencies and regularly scan code (source code and dependencies) for vulnerabilities
Everything Is a URL
.cr2 files are photographs and a lot of cameras can shoot raw, even those much cheaper than a 5d. The magiclantern lets you shoot raw video.
It is curious to me that Swift was chosen as a target language for Tensorflow [1]. It sounds like a really well-designed language but has almost no community outside the iOS platform.

[1] https://www.tensorflow.org/swift
When there is tech, there is a de-facto CTO, does not really matter what title is used for the role. There might be some companies where the tasks are clearly divvied up between different people, but usually the gravity is in some one person. For me this sounds like an attempt to devalue work a de-facto CTO is doing without having to actually pony up money/equity for it. In other words; someone has the responsibility that belongs with the role CTO but she is 'just a capable dev' pushed into that role without getting the rewards that belong with it.
I phrased that a bit wrong: my experience (from talking to the Haskellers in my company) is that Haskellers generally prefer to turn on a bunch of extensions when they write code. So, while you might be able to write pure Haskell98, it tends not to be idiomatic to do so.
V100 Server On-Prem vs. AWS P3 Instance Cost Comparison
Relevant song: https://youtu.be/FgoC15Lom-M
IIRC, TripleByte only gets their finders fee once (if) the candidate makes it through 3 months of employment.

(Of course, you can argue that 3 months of employment isn't enough - but it's a lot more performance data than a bunch of interviews gives.)
> The legal profession seems to have no problem charging by the hour

This is not true. The "billable hour" in the legal profession is a huge source of headaches for individual lawyers and the legal profession at large. The incentive is to work more, rather than work smarter, which is often in the client's interest.
Genuinely curious: how long have you been developing web apps, and what stacks/platforms did you work with previously?

I ask because your reaction goes against everything I've ever felt, and I sincerely want to understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5SycZjGhI
Yeah, this makes sense.

I guess the issue I have is such a tiny minority of people are using such an excess of energy to do something that adds very little value to society. Even if the value of bitcoin is subjective, there's still a tiny minority of people consuming vast amounts of energy to derive what value it does bring them.

It just feel disproportionately harmful at a time when our top scientists are blue in the face from telling us to reduce carbon emissions.

I understand that it's not my place to judge what people derive value from. I also would argue that energy should be neutral (similar to my views on internet access). I guess my biggest gripe is probably something you and me share in common: the understanding that market mechanisms allowed this waste to happen in the first place. So you're definitely not wrong, and your argument about externalities is well-taken.
So can we make fusion with high powered microwaves and grapes? Heh.
I haven't been able to figure out any real difference.

The biggest difference is that Pratt/precedence climbing does not require manipulating an extra stack, but instead uses the normal procedure stack in the same manner as recursive descent. This leads to somewhat simpler code. I've seen far more uses of recursive descent/Pratt than shunting-yard.
Neurons Found to Communicate "Wirelessly" Using Electromagnetic Fields
What to Expect When Beresheet Launches to (and Lands on) the Moon
Can Quasar fibers be efficiently used with other (popular) Java libraries that build on top of the standard libraries? If not, I don't consider that to be good developer experience. That is more of a mistake that cannot be rectified.

Async IO is also fine. The question is, what is your current ecosystem built on top of. AFAIK the answer with Java is definitely not async IO or fibers.

Yes, structural interfaces in Go are implemented poorly. But the standard library uses them very tastefully, putting most standard libraries to shame :) Go also has Closer, and its a separate interface - interfaces are minimal which makes them much easier to implement and more generally applicable.
Splunk Will No Longer Be Selling Software and Services to Russian Organizations
Deepmind's alpha go, alpha go zero, dqn, openAI's DotA bot.
There's a lot of RL success stories.
Too bad they were removed. I don't see why a non-system language should use anything other than green threads nowadays.
Give it a few years.

Seeing how Americans Elected Trump, I can't imagine the USD being better than BTC over 10 years.
See https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
>pathetic ~10 transactions per second.

It's only an artificial limit of Core fork of Bitcoin.

Increasing it to 10 000 transactions per second doesn't use more energy for mining. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7nn5wa/bitcoin_cash_is...
Vocab: An online dictionary integration to the command line
Choosing a Web Framework for F# in 2019
I agree with you. It's possible to work together with the person who wrote the PR to make the code as good as it can possibly be, while also not being a jerk. I try to be very thorough and offer lots of feedback, but also approach things from a position of respect. For example, instead of "why the hell would anyone do it this way" I instead think like "maybe they thought of something that I haven't" and I hope that it comes through in my comments.

When I submit my code for review, I don't just want a rubber stamp, I want thoughtful feedback. If something can be improved, I want to know about it so that I can do it better next time. I try to pay other people the same courtesy. Another commenter said it's all about "disconnecting ego from the work" but I don't really agree. I care a whole lot about my code and that's why I take code reviews seriously. But that doesn't need to translate to anger or feeling emotionally devastated as the article's author somewhat bewilderingly seems to ascribe to his "victims."

Another thing that I keep in mind is a joke I heard one time that you measure how good a piece of code is by the WTFs per minute exclaimed when reading it. It's a metric, not an emotional reaction, and it's going to be at least unity no matter how good the code is.

Then again, I've had the good fortune to work with good people, so maybe I'd be seeing red too if my coworkers were writing really awful code all of the time.
A collimator [1] was probably in front of the film.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimator
Theres one at Eglwysilan Church in wales, locals say that it dates back to the 5th century I have no idea if thats true, its very old and I used to go look at it as a kid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglwysilan
Show HN: Summarized Finance / Tech Newsletter Using Natural Language Processing
For instance: https://www.wasmjit.org/blog/nginx-on-wasmjit.html
Apple’s Latest Macs Have a Serious Audio Glitching Bug
Not in a class action
For the past month, I've been working on this terminal text reader project for fun. It started out as a project to learn more about how to structure and implement a text-based user interface with vi inspired features. It's written in C++17 and is released under the MIT license. I wanted to share it here in case someone may find it interesting.

Fltrdr, or flat-reader, is an interactive text reader for the terminal. It is flat in the sense that the reader is word-based. It creates a horizontal stream of words, ignoring all newline characters and reducing sequential whitespace. Its purpose is to facilitate reading, scanning, and searching text. The program also has a play mode that moves the reader forward one word at a time, along with a configurable words per minute (WPM) setting.

It is highly customizable, with a configuration file to persist your settings. The colourscheme can be changed to match your environments theme using either 24-bit, 8-bit, or 4-bit colours, depending on what your terminal supports. The characters used for the text border and progress bar can be set to a character or unicode-character of your choice. Some of the UI elements, such as the border, progress bar, and status bar can be individually shown/hidden to create a more minimalistic display.

I'm open to any feedback or suggestions!

This blog post from the other week contains videos of it in action: https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo

It can be found here on GitHub: https://github.com/octobanana/fltrdr

It can also be found here on my personal site: https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr
That kind of is recycling though... Its just not reuse.
Now, sure, especially in London. It's grown as a weapon of choice phenomenally quickly over the last 5 years, from almost nothing.

Seems like it may have been noticed being used for honour attacks in communities in London, Bradford, Leicester etc, and escalated from there. A particularly horrible form of attack.
"Will be used against you" to me is one of the strongest arguments against government surveillance without warrants. You can choose to not talk to police. You can't choose to have your data not gathered by the NSA.
Verify, Dont Trust.
I knew a pilot who worked part time running a pro flight simulator out in Townsville, Australia. I could tell it was MS Flight Simulator at the core, despite all the cockpit panels and displays. When I walked around behind it, I saw that all of the gauge clusters were each individual screens and there appeared to be several machines with multiple video cards running the output.

He told me the entire setup was over $11k, which made me wonder what percentage of that were the individual parts, versus all the development costs in making that setup.
> In addition to a shared aversion to voluntarily turning my possessions into billboards

I know that feel, but you can flair up with whimsy rather than corporate tribalism. For example, I have a strawberry from the game Celeste over my MBP's apple logo. It's even less billboardy than before!

> you make it a whole lot easier to pick out your unattended machine from a set, a hotel room, or luggage.

Laptops get mixed up all of the time in security when you fly. A sticker both reduces the probability of this happening accidentally and also makes it harder for a thief to claim innocence if you keep your eye on your laptop and notice someone nab it.
I tend to think unless and until radical parties start getting elected, little to nothing will be done.

With enough clean energy, extensively deployed, all we're probably going to achieve is some really cheap oil that is in search of new uses and products to be drilled for. Banning oil use will be interesting to watch.
I agree.

There's an effort to get at least a standard library namespace, but it's at month 8 of just deciding on the semantics of how to import: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library
But have they stopped crippling the camera when you load aosp?
The author of your paper appears to be attacking another author and yet has nothing to back up their claims other than "Trust me I'm an expert and I know a guy in Hong Kong who tells me what's happening in China!"

The argument summary of your article is hand waving, claims that the sum usage of software designed to be increasingly energy wasteful (Satoshi's random nonce lottery as a means of increasing CAPEX and decreasing production output)

https://digiconomist.net/verify-dont-trust/
The players are too expensive. It's a pity.

DVDs are so blurry as to be unwatchable on large TVs nowadays.

I'm very loathe to pay to watch something that could be de-licensed and made unavailable whenever they feel like it.
Always amazed they operated those things out of Kansas of all places given the fickle Weather they'd operate in.
Apparently, the trade thinks its 1970s-style orgy-bathhouse is fine just like it is--thank you very much.
Sign above Newton's desk: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

We can strive for sustainability and autonomy, but we're forever dependent on each other's work. As they say, it's turtles all the way down.
If you have two great engineers in a kitchen, discussing a relevant problem, you want there to be synergy. That synergy is broken when one of the engineers has to Google how to reverse a binary tree.

It is also a safe place to work for the really exceptional engineers. They can talk freely about complex computer science, without getting blank stares or having to dumb it down. Otherwise it gets frustrating fast.
This is really nice. Is there a way to contact you for some freelance work?
Hello there. I'm the author of this repo.

Not as much has been going on in that project as I would have liked. It certainly doesn't help that:

- The standard library is actually quite poor. A lot of basic functions must be implemented from scratch, and then you'll also want to write proofs about them.

- I had to reinvent IO in Coq.

- Most AOC problems are actually not that well-suited for formal verification. (It's certainly no fault of the AOC organizer!)

In particular, a lot of them basically ask you to simulate some system which doesn't have particularly interesting properties, so the implementation itself is often the best specification of the problem, and the main point of using a language like Coq is lost.

I did find some interesting problems though. For example, day 5 was a simple rewriting system and the question was to find the normal form of some starting string. Well, who's to say that the answer is unique? In this case it's easy enough to convince oneself that the given system actually is confluent, but I set out to prove it formally (and (re)learned a few things about rewriting systems on the way). (c.f., Confluent_react_steps, react_steps_injective, in day_05_common.v)
Boiling Frogs
Sure. The claims about needing to avert climate change before it "destroys the planet" are not about the literal annihilation of the world itself, but about its inhospitability to human life.

Humanity, to some extent, competes with capitalism for resources. But while resources are not at their limit, we can grow together, and capitalism seems to bring us benefits. Humanity also competes with Bitcoin, which is a much newer system that has become seriously competitive very quickly, and it's much less obvious that it's the best or even only way to solve the problems it sets out to solve.
I was able to get it to load after a few tries, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how well it handles the formatting of some of my sites. It seems to do okay with text, though it doesn't seem to support images or form elements; I haven't been able to attempt a login.

For those of you having trouble getting it to load while it's being hugged to death, I took a properly meta screenshot:

https://rusticnes.reploid.cafe/nexus_hacker_news.png
This is where something like CSS Modules comes into its own. You can have (nearly) absolute confidence that what's in the CSS file colocated with the component is only used by that component. Sure, there are escape hatches like `:global(...)`, but those should be considered a code smell.

The beauty of CSS modules over a convention-based approach like BEM is that you end up with cleaner, simpler CSS files -- with selectors like `.Widget .search.error` rather than `.Widget__search--error`. The downside is that there's a compilation step, but chances are that you already have _some_ sort of compilation going on -- even if just to bundle things up.

The way to handle "special" cases for buttons -- like when they appear in certain contexts -- is to allow the calling code to add a class to the button; a class which comes from the caller's own CSS module. Alternatively, use CSS variables:

Button.css

.Button {
background: var(--btn-background, turquoise);
color: var(--btn-foreground, octarine);
}

Nav.css

.Nav {
--btn-background: fuchsia;
--btn-foreground: lime;
}
My take is the opposite. Personally I'm ready to pretax the supplier on all disposable plastic with a refund if proven recycled. If the profit motive isn't strong enough, make it stronger.
Museums Grapple with Rise in Pleas for Return of Foreign Treasures
Context is fundamental in the appreciation but I think it's much less about the artist's life per se (although that could enrich the experience & interpretation, depending), and more about your cultivated tastes with the medium.

Your experience of food, wine is a function of your prior experience (and -- most importantly -- interest) w/ food & wine. Never had much wine before (like me), and you'll shrug w/ indifference at every glass. But this is only (my) ignorance/lack of interest/etc. It's a lacking.

Likewise, if your experience engaging w/ a painting on canvas is limited and mostly of disinterest/disengagement then so much of any given painting is going to be lost on you. Not completely, but by a large margin it will be.

The last question about recognizing the painting as a masterpiece is a little misplaced or needs fleshing out... No one looks at a painting and categorizes it as masterpiece or not. What one does is look at a painting and is given an experience and range of emotion. If that emotion is intense -- eg, exhilarating or intriguing or aggravating -- then the next question will be -- do I think this is a universal reaction? (I.e., not idiosyncratic to me. Experience guides in answering this follow-up, of course.) Then, if so: does this artist have an agent? Could I be his/her agent (if you think about making $$ alot)? OR: surely this piece is already established its market, ie been established as a Masterpiece by prior or current culture. Anyway what strong emotion typically does in any flesh & blood human is inevitably send us racing after questions like these..