skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a grad student, my trust that they actually did what they said they did is 0. If you don’t publish your source code without a damned good reason (i.e. your legal department says you are not allowed to), your publication is near worthless in non-theory CS since it is very likely to be unreproducible and probably has bugs which render the conclusions invalid.
The importance of the medium
Small and robust switches don't exist in nature it seems.

Been doing a design proposal for a yet another ultrathin laptop, this time with "pro gaming" spin.

One of client requirements was "be it the end of the world, but switches must be mechanical."

That sounded like an easy task... , but we ended up spending a week on the switch and having them custom made by a watch parts factory.

It is remarkably difficult to design a purely mechanical mechanism for making a "snapping action" that will be small and moderately wear resistant.

We almost thought of "screw that, lets make the mechanism electrostatically actuated," but finally made a parallelogram mechanism with just enough set of spring loading there, and there
I'd say currently ML is heuristics done by a computer. The rigour of statistics isn't quite present in ML yet. At least, not in the basic courses yet.
The HN consensus has simplified things in such a way that any shades of gray are tossed out.

When you are just starting out charging by the hour and starting with small stuff is fine. But your goal should be to transition to charging by the week as soon as you can afford it, because you can't afford to charge by the hour for your whole career.

Keep in mind that those that have 'arrived' tend to take their life experience and then condense it down to bullet points without nuance, after all, unqualified statements sound so much better than qualified ones. But it's all about the balance and to get to charging by the week you may need to start by charging by the hour.

Service > product > weekly rates > daily rates > hourly rates.

The further you are to the left the more money you'll make but you have to start somewhere.
If you are buying mens clothing, the sizes are actually the relevant measurements in inches, so getting the right size is not that hard (you may only need to order two sizes).

But I completely agree with you about retail treating me like a criminal: nobody has counted things going into the dressing room yet, but it is getting more and more difficult to be allowed to leave the stores without purchase anymore.
I read The Origin of Species - it is a surprisingly readable book and I like the English it uses, words like incipient etc. that you don't hear often.

That said, the chapters on pigeon fancying were rather dull.
Nothing wrong with specialization. It's a waste of my time and potentially a waste of money if I ruin the item. There are many shops in town, some excellent at mending and alterations and at very reasonable cost.
For that, I get excellent quality work that will hold up instead of me ruining the garment through inexperience.
I'll stick to my soldering iron, they can keep their thread and needle.
A friend was recently complaining about having to buy a new $2000 fridge, how his old one only lasted 8 years, and how everything is junk nowadays. He described the symptoms to me [gradual loss of cooling capability, soft ice cream, then melting ice cubes] and I told him I solved the same problem 2 years ago and his was almost surely a broken defrost heater leading to a totally iced up [therefore no airflow] cooling unit, that troubleshooting would take him 15 minutes to confirm, and if that was it, it was a $20 90-minute repair (most of which is waiting for the freezer to defrost).

He looked at me like I had 3 heads to even consider a fridge repair and a week or so later sent me a pic of his new, $2000 fridge in place. I tried.
Fair question. I would say the primary difference is that in most workplaces men are seen as being competent, and being male is not a disadvantage or put you in a minority. There are undoubtedly professions where stereotypes about men would be harmful. For example if a man wants to become a flight attendant, nurse, or a school teacher.

Also consider examples outside of work, like dating. The tall, handsome, muscular guy is more likely to be perceived as desirable even though those traits don't necessarily correlate with what makes a good boyfriend. A man in search of a partner might feel objectified if his potential partner had posters of good-looking men up on her wall.
Thank you for the advice.

I'm working remotely now so it is indeed a self-reinforcing thing.

But the reason I work remotely now is that I was constantly being watched when working in offices and it burned me out very, very fast having to keep up the appearance of working after a 2-3h run, or else be penalized.
I find typing on a grid much more comfortable and pleasant than typing on a traditional staggered layout.

As an experiment, place your fingers on the home row and naturally curl them out/up or in/down and see how straight or curved the path they follow is. For me, on a normal keyboard, I find that the buttons above the home row are positioned well for my fingers but for the ones below, my fingers naturally curl over the gap between the keys, meaning I have to also bend sideways. With a grid I can press both the keys above and the ones below without any sideways motion (for the four keys on each hand above and below the home row testing keys).

Nowadays I use a kinesis advantage, though, which has not only grid layout but also has them in a curved height to more naturally let your fingers reach the rows without any additional movements and I love it. But even on a flat keyboard, I find a grid works better for me.
Those 30 minutes of your time are only more 'valuable' if the only thing of value which counts is monetary value. This is, of course, not the case. Money is nothing but a means to an end, it should never be the end itself. Assuming the end to be a sense of personal satisfaction over a task well accomplished - whether that task be feeding yourself and possibly your family, raising any children to be a boon instead of a burden to society or just enabling you to be lazing on a beach somewhere - it is not inconceivable for time spent mending something to have more total value than time spent earning money so you can buy a new something.
That or just straight up blackmail you.

Our politicians are grim enough without some dude rocking from the Chinese Ministry of State Security and extorting them into doing something worse than the thing they'd already do anyway*

* if that is possible sometimes.
Cabal: P2P offline-first messaging platform
Shichao's Notes
In 2016, I relocated from Silicon Valley to southern Rhode Island to build and reside in a new custom home. Over the next two years, I probably injected up to $1M into the local economy. I didn't expect or receive any special treatment from the local government. I didn't go to local officials and threaten to relocate elsewhere unless they gave me incentives, tax breaks, concessions, enticements, zoning variances, etc.

In my opinion, the type of special treatment that New York offered Amazon is fundamentally anti-democratic and just plain wrong.
Genuine question: does regular muscle meat contain any nerves? I was under the impression all of our muscles contain efferent neurons to deliver motor control signals and afferent neurons to send back stretch reception signals / proprioception / pain.

But I wouldn't know exactly where these nerve fibres are located and if they're completely removed from regular cuts of meat.

Another question is: do the prions accumulate and remain in the main body (soma) of the nerve cell, or do the prions diffuse throughout the axons and dendrites of the nerve cells.

If prions remain within the soma, then removing nerve ganglia from products intended for human consumption or animal feed would, one supposes, limit the spread of prions.
Being able to turn 30 minutes into longer-wearing clothes means you don’t have to be able to get paid the way you currently are for those 30 minutes forever. Along with various clothing repair activities and normal cooking, I bake bread and can jam from seasonal fruit surplus. If I just look at my hourly take-home, that is some expensive bread and jam.

However, if I think about when I won’t be earning like that anymore, it shifts a bit. That “when” is hopefully 20 years from now (when I’d like to retire), but could be next year and for awhile if the economy goes south. It also helps that I enjoy those things enough to consider them hobbbies.

We also remodeled our own kitchen, doing everything but electricals ourselves (including knocking through a new entrance and closing the old one). From an immediate cost perspective, I should have hired someone to lay the tiles instead of doing it myself. That experience, though, means that I can now easily do my own tile repairs and can better assess the quality of work I might pay others to do. It ended up being fun enough that I’m looking for another tiling project!
I wonder whether traditional marriage is the cause of western style society rather than a product of it.

If only the Alpha males get to reproduce then you only select for Alpha male type characteristics. You don't select for the gene sets that will produce new inventions, good craftspeople, or people who can work at administration of larger groups.
The Next Big Thing – Andrei Alexandrescu – Meeting C++ 2018 Opening Keynote
Yeah, as most people here wrote already, it's statistics. And your models will yield those statistics...

Unfortunately if you're an engineer/physicist/chemist/biologist/social-scientist your background in statistics is neither fresh nor deep. So your professor comes to you: can you do something with ML, it's such a hot topic (your boss has also no background in statistics nor do his peers (which review your stuff...)) you say: yes (because a no I don't know about it won't be good for you). Then you go to some google or blockchain sponsored-tutorial where some self-taught-Indian-CS-Bachelor is telling you how to use ML with Python and Tensorflow. You might wonder about some things but in the end you need to get things done and feed your data (which is often garbage, but verifying that it's not is not hot) into an algorithm you don't understand. Then you find some other guys, doing this, cite them and publish. 0 scientific value generated, but a great step for your academic carrer nonetheless.
One of the things I do is split all my programming tasks into two categories, requires concentration and (necessary) scutwork.

Then I work on one or the other entirely dependent on how I feel that day, so I'm productive even when I'm not mentally at 100%.

Good things for scutwork are documentation, updating dependencies, automating manual processes, checking backups, organising issues on the backlog etc, things I can comfortably do without requiring complete focus.

It definitely helps since I don't feel like I'm just present in front of the computer but getting things done (and things that are important to boot).
> What is the point of integrating a computer and a monitor in the same enclosure?

It’s a good display bundled with your computer, which is an appealing option to many because it’s one less thing they have to worry about.
Footnote in pg's article makes me wonder what the stats are today. I'd guess Windows down, Mac way up, Linux/FreeBSD about flat [maybe slightly up], but I have no idea.

[2] Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago.
I can recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Created_the_Integers

"God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History is an anthology, edited by Stephen Hawking, of "excerpts from thirty-one of the most important works in the history of mathematics.""
Show HN: Looking for beta testers (job seekers)
iMac users don’t upgrade their computers. It’s an appliance like a microwave.

I switched to an iMac after I realized that every time I tried to upgrade my desktop, everything was incompatible with the new stuff, forcing me to effectively upgrade everything at once and build a new computer. This kept happening every 4 years.

I could have avoided this with incremental upgrades, but who has time for that?
When people talk about how much their time is worth; they're not talking about it from a strictly financial point of view but from a personal satisfaction point of view. ie if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids or an hour I miss chatting to my wife.

So it's not about counting pennies but about justifying outsourcing jobs you don't enjoy so you can spend more time on the stuff that really matters.

This point of view is particularly important to those of us who have really busy lives and thus are often juggling our time between different responsibilities (family, work, household chores, etc).
I'm solo and I've followed this advice and it did me well.
Dropbox and Google Drive aren’t great on Apple’s platforms. Files integration on iOS makes them somewhat passable (though, they don’t quite work right there either), and on macOS Dropbox is horribly invasive while Google Drive is poorly maintained and slow :(
Who cares? I use safari on my phone and have been slowly switching away from google creepiness to Firefox.
Hybrid motors using solid fuels (plastic, rubber, cardboard, even sausage) and liquid oxidizer (typically nitrous oxide) are pretty common in hobby rocketry. These can be trivially made throttleable within a range by metering the NO2 flow. With the proper fuel core, they can be kept "smoldering" for shutdown / relight by maintaining a trickle of oxidizer to keep the fuel surface at combustion temperature.
I buy up the really old ones and repair them then give them away. They last a lifetime (literally, these are machines from the 30's to the 70's and it is not rare that the previous owner had it as a wedding gift and passed away). I love the Naumann brand, they are really indestructible, light industrial stuff.

There are some intricate bits the trickery required to get the timing just right is at the edge of my patience but when they run it is like music.
Training models to predict a word even before you write it
Or maybe he/she means that the government shouldn't be able to record your kids' political activity? And connect this in a big database to you.
Agree!! I used to find his claims amusing but I’m paying the price now.
No, what they're doing is nerfing webRequest so that the ad blockers cannot use it to block ads anymore.
And I wake up happy to be a vegetarian ...

F@ck the USDA.
It lasts longer but less cheating happens? How? Has marriage actually become stronger?
Indeed. Things become more consumer friendly, i.e. more general public friendly, but less power user friendly. This happened with cars (they have many electronic components that aren't as easy to repair as it was in the past, when everything was mechanic) and has been happening with computers for some time, regarding both software and hardware (walled gardens, dumbed-down operating systems with fewer and fewer configuration options[0], simplified UIs, etc).

[0]: I can only talk about Windows, which is what I use extensively. I noticed that there are many things that I could do in Windows 7 (sometimes using non-Microsoft tools, like Open Shell) and that are not possible any more in Windows 10.
I don't understand this comment as a response to your parent one. The condensed bullet point that it linked shows that dropping hourly rates wouldn't happen until step 5. As I understand it, all you describe would fall under the period of time one takes to get through 1-4
‘Five Eyes’ governments call on tech giants to build encryption backdoors
The context here is that Proudhon was an anarchist; he'd have been equally critical of the state as he was landlords if this work was being critical of that, but this was about property in general, something he sees as common both in the land owned by the state and the land owned by private persons. The argument is that if property can be owned and appropriated, taken to its logical conclusion this would mean that any and all property can be owned and appropriated, including these common areas more guaranteed in Europe than they are in the US. Proudhon writing in 1840, at least, saw this was the case all over the world - the enclosure of the commons in Britain, for instance, which disenfranchised many from exactly those kind of activities. He doesn't argue it should be free from restriction, he says it should be regulated because it's scarce, but in the interest of all, not for profit. How this works in an anarchist society is up to him and his idea of mutualism, which is fairly niche as far as anarchism goes.

The situation he's pointing out is that you shouldn't have to be going to homeless shelters or camping in a natural park. The fact these are named as options is even rather farcical, reminding me of the quote that the rich and poor are equally barred from stealing loaves of bread and camping outside buildings. It goes beyond preference into a totally different qualitative state of living.
New Private City in Norway Adopts Crypto as Medium of Exchange
Not sure if you have experience doing software consulting or not, but you describe exactly what forces freelancers to negotiate their rates down and burn out, vs successful consultants who charge much more, work on much more valuable projects with better paying clients.

I won't repeat what patio11 and others always say here, but if you are a freelancer and charge hourly, I would encourage you try and follow their advice and see how it goes. I have, and it's been wonderfully successful!
That was the original reason, yes. Now Chrome is installed by default on tons of new laptops etc because Google makes so much money by tracking users via Chrome that they can pay serious $$ to manufacturers to tweak their base build.
If you can get a prescription, it's dirt cheap.
Google did NOT backtrack on ANYTHING. From the new thread:

> Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3. In particular, there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request). We are also continually listening to and evaluating the feedback we’re receiving, and we are still narrowing down proposed changes to the webRequest API.

"We are still narrowing down proposed changes" means they still plan on removing the part of webRequest that everyone cares about, the feature that lets it block requests.

There was an initial thread about these changes: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom.... Lots of people made great comments about why the proposed change was a bad idea. What did Google do? Ignore the thread and post another about how they are "iterating" on Manifest V3. Google's strategy is clear: wait for the outrage to subside, keep making new threads to divert discussion if you have to, then go ahead and make the changes you were planning on anyway.

Keep in mind that their story about performance has been shown to be a complete lie. There is no performance hit from using webRequest like this. This is about removing sophisticated ad blockers in order to defend Google's revenue stream, plain and simple.
Honestly I do perfectly fine with a host and some autogeneration. I have considered just editing the raw HTML and keeping it in git, but it seems a tad pointless.
Yup. As someone who is in a junior position in the field - I'm torn between, on one hand, riding the wave so to speak and taking advantage of all the buzzwords that I can put on my resume (which is fine with me because I can back them up), and on the other hand avoiding association with a certain type of person/career path that might turn out be just hot air in a couple of years.

So if I can actually write decent code, have solid understanding of software development principles, have studied math and statistics from the ground up to an advanced level, am familiar with relevant research - then do I really want to call myself a data scientist (or ML-something) just because it might improve my job/salary prospects, or do I want to stay away from it because everyone who takes a one-week course on Udemy calls themselves a data scientist without being able to back it up with actual skills?
where these hot guys throw off their shirts at the hint of an opportunity ?

I don't know why, but I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spwTDpJ0-eY
They should, it shouldn't be difficult. I think the issue is more that ML gives more tools that a reasearcher could employ to get any arbitrary result if they knew what they are looking for.
BGP ranking is a free software to calculate the security ranking of an ISP
I think you got the point. A lot of people don't seem to realize that ML might be great for finding patterns but will never yield scientific knowledge in the sense of cause-reaction sense.

Unfortunately everyone thinks he can use it for finding "new stuff" and so in my field they "predict material properties", etc. using ML fed with data where every review about the physics tells you that the algorithms they use for extracting that data are domain-specific and might yield results different on the order of magnitudes. But nobody cares; take some SW off the net, which claims to be able to extract what you want, run it, train your ML, publish your results.
He specifically praises iCloud Photos which works great for most people and keeps a lot of users photos safe without setting up anything.

The "put things into a folder to share with other people" aspect isn't really mentioned which would be the Dropbox or Google Drive use case you are talking about I guess.

Personally I think it works just fine, also as a Dropbox equivalent if you don't need to share it with other people. As soon as you want to share something it gets annoying pretty quickly though in my experience.
I definitely think generating electricity is the way out for the energy/heat. I think they just apply reverse voltage to drain the LED actively.
> What is the point of integrating a computer and a monitor in the same enclosure?

So, like every laptop?
That is a cool technique. I wonder if it can be translated into a garbage collected language, to create a nonmoving and compacting GC.
> As an American, I'd rather be spied on by the Chinese than by my own government.

Considering the low-quality of security in Chinese products, you are much more susceptible to be spied upon by the Chinese...and the American spy agencies, and Russia spy agencies, and criminal groups, and so on.
I bet your friend recycles plastic bags to help save the environment.
Squeezing Water from Stone – KornShell in 2019
Science works because it posits models first, and then data is sought to confirm or disconfirm it. The benefit of having a model first is that it is much more likely to be general (and hence reproducible).

ML does completely opposite. Data first, and then the model is discovered using data. It's pretty easy to see why it would lead to non-reproducible models.
and by the way, we organise a free and open training (25 March 2019) session in Luxembourg on how to use and extend AIL. The registration link -> https://en.xing-events.com/SHKMYKL.html
The Unwinding of the Miracle review: cancer memoir is an epic in miniature
I can say with certainty that none of my clothes are talismanic.
What happens when techno-utopians run a country
Command line utilities–in the Cloud
I was expecting Gruber to give out A+ on all fronts based on the things he posts about Apple, but it was a fair report card.

I’m glad he called out the shopping experience in stores. I thought roaming checkout would be convenient, but it’s maddening having to comb through the store just to find an available sales associate to buy a small thing.

Apple used to have dedicated checkout plus roaming checkout. Now they only have roaming checkout.