skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They aren't predetermined, free will is not the opposite of determinism.

You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...
> There's a reason that glibc doesn't officially support static linking, and that is NSS, and PAM.

Thanks for pointing this out; I'd hit this problem in the past and it's annoying to see people keep promoting static linking as a silver bullet when there is a genuine purpose to dynamically linking the name services.
Ya I get emails like this coming in from my contact form too. Honestly though it's very hard to distinguish real ones from spam so I never respond.

I'm not sure this is the best approach...
Watch this video for a good breakdown of what people think happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cexN2-T6dxY&feature=youtu.be he has a followup video with additional pictures sent in from the scene that seems to corroborate his thoughts
Microsoft makes AI tool for better search available as an open source project
Determinism and predictability are distinct concepts, it is epistemically dangerous to conflate them.
> Once solar and wind, without any subsidies, are cheaper than coal, then societies will switch purely out of self interest.

If coal prices included the negative externalities costs - in other words, if we charged coal companies for dumping their trash into our collective air instead of subsidizing them by letting them do it for free - it would greatly change the price comparison. Then the market would likely do the rest.
Computers always. I lose paper too easily. I type faster than I can write. I like using markdown and having backups and being able to copy and paste stuff in.
One clarification here that fills me with a mixture of disgust and heartbreak:

"in rural areas, land is being used" -- it's more that, in rural areas, land is being owned. Not necessarily used. I lived in an extremely rural area for several years and was surrounded by fenced-off land that nobody used because some rich doctor somewhere owned it. You couldn't hike on it, couldn't camp on it, certainly no one else could use it. What a shitty system.

And yes, I recognize that the system that permits some out-of-state doctor to "own" thousands of acres is the same one that would permit me to some day, and I don't give a shit; I'd rather structure the world in such a way that nobody could fence it off like that. Maybe as small a tweak as a 'right to roam' law in America.
Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide, not deliberate and not think...or you do accept that some thoughts cannot be _prethought_ by you and they come to you for you to control.

So why control _those_ thoughts?
Why deliberate in _that particular way_?
I have the same confusion about his statement as you do. His weather analogy is also strange because the weather only takes one path, presumably determined by physics and initial conditions. I doubt many people would argue there's agency directing local weather (although some might).
Some people do claim that, yeah.

But I'd say there is actually a level between non-typist and touch-typist where the person needs to be looking at the keyboard, but knows where each key is and reaches that direction without actually having to move their eyes. They're really close to being a touch-typist, but they still need their eyes to get their fingers on the buttons reliably.

I'd argue that Qwerty vs Dvorak relies on that intermediary step rather than actual "touch typing", but there isn't really a name for it.
Wasn't it the case that Facebook, one of the biggest American companies, bought Onavo precisely to spy on other tech companies and steal their business?
I switched from QWERTY to my language's equivalent of Dvorak and a few years later back.

I think most important than the layout itself, is to learn how to touch type. Keeping your fingers on the home row. Using opposing control characters instead of using one hand to reach multiple keys, etc etc.
It is not possible universally. I like the proof of this, it is simple and resembles to many similar no-go theorems (like the halting problem).

1. Imagine a finite formal system which universally can identify if an input is regular (compressible) or random (not compressible) / So we are using the Kolmogorov-complexity definition of randomness here...

2. Assume the above formal system can be described using L bits (e.g. it is an L bit long program)

3. Lets take the first (e.g. smallest in numerical ordering) 2×L (or 10×L, 100×L, ... take it as large you want) long bit string that the program classifies as random bit string

4. "3." is a definition of a 2×L long string in L bits (the formal system itself) + constant

5. The 2×L long string is therefore compressibe so it is not random - but our original algorithm is misclassify it as random (it is in its definition) - so the algorithm is not universal...
A lot of people don't realise it but a lot of the tasks you do for you employer could very well have been a startup. There's a reason your employer has you working on those problems: They know what their clients want.

Cisco is famous for funding startups by its fromer employees that satisfy their client wants. Google might be trying something similar with Area120?

Being successful at startups is although an entirely different matter, and I guess that's why most people don't take up the opportunity. The paychecks are golden handcuffs, for some.

I think, these pg essays are relevant:

http://paulgraham.com/before.html

> The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.

...

> At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity.

...

http://paulgraham.com/start.html

> ...you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.

...

> The best odds are in niche markets. Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most. And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity.

> If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.

> Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.
The last take home thing I did, I put it up on GitHub with an MIT license (didn’t sign any NDAs/etc). I figured if there was a chance they would actually use it, might as well open source it for everyone.
Given that a lot of these questions seem relevant for people considering to try rust for the first time, including some sort of link on the main website might be helpful.
From the Independent coverage:

> The force had put out a statement saying “anyone who declines to be scanned will not necessarily be viewed as suspicious”. However, witnesses said several people were stopped after covering their faces or pulling up hoods.

> “The guy told them to p* off and then they gave him the £90 public order fine for swearing,” Ms Carlo added. “He was really angry.”

I live close to Romford, and I'm quite tempted to wander past with my face obscured and then politely decline if asked to be photographed.

Of course, I'm white, middle class and middle aged, so I probably wont be stopped.
I am a software engineer and I was once asked during an interview at a large hedge fund to pick a side and debate why war is justified.

When I pressed them about the relevance, they indicated that they often have heated debates on all manner of topics, so they wanted to see my thought process.

I enjoy solving complex problems, but socio-ethical problems are way outside of my wheelhouse.

I politely indicated that I didn't think the company was a good fit for me.
This echos my experience of school the only thing they ever tried to teach me was to conform. Like you I was no genius but I guess the nail that sticks out gets the hammer.
There are examples of very different tracks built from the same set in this blog post: https://thingsinjars.com/post/497/harmonious-studio/
I'm afraid this will be seen as a fairly arrogant stance. Plenty of people cannot type reasonably without looking at their keyboard once in a while, if only for the symbols. I know plenty of programmers who are productive enough, and can type letters and parentheses and so forth without looking away from the screen, but need to glance at the keyboard for the lesser-used symbols.

Those people definitely know how to type. In fact, they know how to type _far_ better than many of the people in this world who don't work with a computer 7 days per week >=8 hours per day.
If you watch most people typing they occasionally glance at the keyboard, especially for little-user keys. A true touch typist should be able to type for extended periods without looking at the keyboard at all even for only occasionally used keys. Also true touch typing minimises finger and hand movements by using as many of the fingers of the hand to type with as possible, while most keyboard users rely on a few, and often just two fingers for most or all typing.
Much more important for code, especially library code is readability
> in the sense that you cannot easily predict next value

Easily or _in principle_?

Do not conflate our physical constraints with the actual mechanism behind the scene. Free will is not about our own ignorance or inability, it is the principal thing.
Yes. Have a look at some professionals you interact with that you'd expect to type a lot. Real estate agents, doctors, bankers, etc. You don't have to look far to find someone who pecks with index fingers whole looking at the keyboard. They sure know how to type (they produce the text they intend to) and do a lot of it every day.
Imho too slow of a response from them. Don't they have sysops automation?
AvE did two videos on the collapse, both very good. The comments are excellent, and worth skimming even if you’re generally allergic to YouTube comments. There are explanations from several ironworkers who actually erect and dismantle cranes, as well as from managers and foremen.
There are often overtime exceptions for seasonal work. If x% of your revenue is earned in y months you don't need to pay overtime. Landscaping likely qualifies as seasonal.
What really matters is growth to cost, if every dollar they spend results in 1.1 earned dollars tomorrow, that's great, that's what I want to see as an investor. If every dollar invested results in more negative dollars, well.... When does the bonfire stop, when money stops going in.

As surprised as I am, they seem to be on the right track from reading this article

Update: ok after selling junk bonds and losing almost $2b a year going for the IPO? Yeah that won't end well. They're another loser looking for public fund bag holders
Still, the notion of shaken geologists because of earthquakes is pretty funny.
This might be a stupid question, but how is the assisting crane finally disassembled? Is it a different type that doesn't need disassembling in the same way?
I guess you are joking. Or are you seriously trying to say that you have more choices because you are living in a rural area and have to take the car whenever you want to go anywhere?

Just as an example, where I am sitting right now, I have more than 30 restaurants and cafés that I can reach within 5 minutes walk. If I don't mind walking a bit longer, or taking the subway a few stops, for a total traveltime of say 20 minutes, I can reach hundreds, most likely thousands, of restaurants. Shopping and entertainment are similar.

And this is far from a mega-city, but a city with around a million people.
> How do you open word documents from the 90’s?

LibreOffice
One thing to focus on is how much of the crash was telecom vs. dot.com companies. An excess of fiber was laid, which was a boon to later companies like Google which bought dark fiber at low prices, competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...) rose and fell based on changing law and regulations in the US, equipment manufacturers like Lucent were at the whip end of demand, especially since they financed a lot of the purchases of the equipment they were selling, and some of the biggest Internet service providers blew up in one way or another, see Worldcom for example.

The hype? Largely justified, even if the timing was off, there's no denying this has become a very big thing, note Amazon was founded in 1994. For me getting a job was no different than getting one prior to the Internet really taking off in this first wave.

BjoernKW's comments about the job being not tightly defined, and being responsible for many things including raw hardware matches my experience. And "cloud" alternatives to your own hardware, even if installed at a colo, weren't an option, weren't even for the start of 2nd batch of companies following the crash. And like his experience, one of the companies I worked for in the late 1990s lasted through it and way beyond, was independent until a few years ago when they were bought and folded into another company.

One very big difference is that the IPO exit option largely ended for most companies, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002 seems to have been the tipping point.
At that rate they won't expand for much longer...
They're convincing to me. I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process that was always going to happen in that particular way. A ball doesn't choose to bounce when it is dropped on the ground.
I believe that we landed on the moon. The US is the worlds greatest country and we have freedom.

I don't believe the Chinese did. The Chinese government has what 5 million people in concentration camps and they claim that they don't

China is extremely behind in technology so that is why they are always sending immigrants to the US. They pretend to be US citizens get jobs at apple and boeing and then they send everything back to china in a usb drive.

China is known for faking GDP statistics, and they build massive empty cities to fake economic growth

They jail anyone who is skeptical about china's claims, if I was in China right now I would probably be in jail for questioning the governments moon landing.
Really? We are currently disengaging in Syria. We left Iraq. If people had cared that much about leaving earlier, we would have left earlier because they would have made it an important issue of a campaign. A couple people criticizing it do not change policy. This is the flaw of the tyranny of the majority, which is why we are set up to allow more power to state and local governments.

Of course, Iran is now threatening free trade through the straits of hormuz. Would you call intervention to protect free passage "toppling foreign governments" because they "make decisions we don't like"?
Back in 2000, I had an in-person interview at a very small b2b website. They'd been using overseas contractors (zero local technical people) and the founder/interviewer barely knew a thing about computers. He didn't know how to run a technical interview, so he sat me down at a computer, logged in as root on prod (lol the only server), and pointed me at a couple of bugs. I knocked them out lickety-split and was hired on the spot. The world sure has changed
> It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...

But you can have a process interacting with itself in a nonlinear way, and the outcome of those types of processes are difficult to predict.

Even if you write a small non linear program, with each instruction completely simple and clear, it's still very difficult to predict the outcome without running the program.

Now imagine that at a scale ten or twenty orders of magnitude higher.
No, I don't think that's it. Art, justice, etc, have constituent parts. People disagree, but there's lots of stuff in those boxes. When I turn my minds eye to free will, there's nothing there.
Again, read the book. The Internet made all sorts of communication and organizing easier. Most of that is good. Some of it is terrible.
>My point is I think it’s all about process. Asking questions, reasoning from first principles, obsessive focus, curiosity and resiliency will make any person gifted.

People that are smarter than average rarely think that what they do is particularly mind-blowing. And a lot of it is really not Rainman-esque transcendent intelligence. But the reality is that the baseline of what most people are capable of is so very low. A huge percentage of people are laboring with short-term memory deficits, learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a whole host of things that make basic logic and planning very difficult for them.
My mind went immediately to Seveneves [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
The word "startup" was only recently coined. We didn't know what we were doing. At all. All the standard business knowledge and tech knowledge that is comon knowledge today had not yet been figured out. Incubators were not a thing. The VC market hadn't yet figured things out. Hype wasn't about getting a huge exit, it was about people paying you millions for a static HTML page that happened to get some traffic. And simply the ability to put up a site could be a viable business. There was no tie between business value and company worth. It was all chaos, and truly a wild west type environment.

As far as the work environment, it is exactly what you read about. A few guys in a basement or a garage. A desktop sitting next to you as the server. Slinging code and trying to get it to customers. At my first startup, we didn't even have an internet connection - we developed on a local LAN, and transferred the deliverable to the clients via FTP from home, or sometimes even via disk. We got a few customer and rented an office space, and then had 6 guys in 3000 square feet of open space with a few folding tables. Later, we were able to build out walls, hire more people, and make it a real office.

We went public, had lots of paper numbers next to our names, and then it all crashed.
A redirect would be helpful so the old links still work.
Easy to be so rational when it's not your town.
> I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process

Who says it's a physical process to begin with? That's an assertion, not a proof.

More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)
If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can exist that can determine, with certainty, M's behavior ahead of M, then M is still "deterministic" in the physics sense of the word, but is it deterministic enough to claim no free will?

I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.
Rust on Linux has a bug that it puts libstd's debug info into the executable, even in release mode.

You need to run `strip` on the executable :(
>..but want to make London safer.

It would be nice to be safer from police harassment.
Good point. That never even occurred to me.
> unless they outright block US services from their networks- in which case there will be riots in the streets.

People aren't going to be rioting in the streets because they lose access to Google and Facebook, come on.

People in western democracies put up with a hell of a lot worse than that from their governments without rioting.

> You can't outcompete a free nation. That's kind of its main advantage.

I'd like to believe that was true, but I think China will prove us wrong in the coming decades.
If carbon was placed under a cap and trade system, where it had a price, and entities which emit CO2 pay for that privilege, then that externality won't be so external, those who do the most damage pay the highest price, and those who can perform carbon capture and storage can realise a revenue stream.
Teach them QWERTY. I use Programmer's Dvorak and I love it. But I also have a very specialized setup and everything optimized for myself. Your kids will have to work with different setups in the next decade or two. For them it's more important to be flexible. Later when they specialized themselves and only work in an environment they control they can switch and choose whatever fits them.
Technically he was fined for swearing at the police, not for covering his face. If he had said nothing he would not have been fined but might have been searched as the police have the power to stop and search anyone who they have reasonable cause to suspect is acting suspiciously.
Man in the news photos didn't look that dark either.
I agree with you. I was immediately struck by the tone of the article that the author was "fortunate" enough to be interviewed by Google. Maybe it's because I've been working for nearly 20 years now and am becoming an "old man", but the feeling that Google is this promised land of opportunity rubs me the wrong way. Every company has pros and cons and I suppose Google may have a lot of pros (free food, good perks, and good pay) but at the end of the day, it's just a big company where you work on large projects and will likely have little say in the final product's look and feel.
Unfortunately not.

Coding is like math homework. When your doing the math homework you know when your done, it's very obvious and anyone can check your work and clearly see it's either right or wrong.

Design is like a book report for English class, it's bottomless and can always be improved given more time, albeit with diminishing returns. Design challenges are evil and bullshit, you can poor hundreds of hours into a design challenge and still iterate further.
I'll ask one question. Is someone really needs typing speeds over 200 keys/minute? What task nowadays benefits from such speeds? Will these tasks keep being relevant in ten years?

As a programmer I do not need 200 chars/minute. I believe that developed skills to use movement keys and key sequences, like arrow keys, Ctrl-arrows, Home, End, and others. For example, I struggle every time with a laptop keyboard, because Home/End/Delete are oddly placed and I miss them half of the times.
I use QUERTY and UK/US keyboard layout, and the just memorised the Option key combos for the åäö etc. was less hassle for me.
We give a test that should take 1-2 hours, and give them an entire 7 days to do it. I feel like you might be being unnecessarily restrictive in your time limits.

What I've seen is that people spend the time they'll spend on it, and that's it. Only 1 or 2 people over the last few years have said they ran out of time, and the quality of their code showed that they weren't a fit for the company anyhow.
> The force had put out a statement saying “anyone who declines to be scanned will not necessarily be viewed as suspicious”.

That's why it's called "erosion of rights" and not "outright nullification of rights". Unfortunately, it works, and it's entirely unsurprising that face surveillance will become normalized.