skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see I have been unclear. Please accept my apologies for my error.

I do not think it reasonable to rush through any thing, option, or approach in this arena. I do not suggest or advise any actions of the sort in any way, shape, or form. I do think it's worth taking the time to ensure that risks are handled properly. I think it's worth having a uniform framework for identifying what those risks are and reasoning about them to enable planning. I also think we should consider carefully the potential benefits of exploring multiple possibilties, against the chance that the most pleasing and lowest risk ones do not pan out.

Again, please accept my apoligies for being unclear. I hope I've made myself clearer! Please don't hesitate to ask if there's anything else I can communicate better.
>you have a weird definition of democracy if you think that the councils should do whatever their citizens want as a majority.

How is that a "weird definition of democracy"? That's literally what democracy means!

Yes, if a majority of people want policies which result in them dying by the thousands from pollution, then in a democratic system, that's what you have to give them. If the politicians do something highly unpopular, even though it's for the good of the society, they get voted out (assuming there's competing politicians who promise to give the people what they want). That's how democracy works. This is why democratic systems don't work very well when the populace is uneducated and stupid.
and therefore, we have to invade Iraq
“The first rule of government spending is build two at twice the price” — S. R. Hadden
Looks like branding done for a shoe company, completely out of place and generic. For programming languages, I think the worse the branding, the better. Just look at GNU.org or the Python website. But, this is a personal opinion of mine.

It could have been so much better, but instead they hired and chose the most cookie cut color scheme from Web 2.0 days, cliche logo that belongs on a shoe and a completely useless brand guide.

They should have hired C&G&H, InterBrand, Pentagram or someone sophisticated enough to understand that this is not a hot retail project, this is branding for a programming language.

What a shame, really. Sorry for a blunt criticism but I dislike almost every aspect of their branding. As a side note, I love Rust-Lang.org branding. It’s amazing. It conveys modernization + robustness.
"we all shimmer from the same inexplicable source"

Just thought I'd say I love this description.
Buffer has been widely successful in implementing open salaries
Kids who went to Sudbury Schools (no curriculum, democratic free schools) report developing high resilience. In these schools kids do what they like: read, videogames, singing, whatever, without any academic pressure or expectations. They try stuff and fail. They have to think about what they actually want to do, rather than looking to the teacher to tell them what to do.
> One of the major achievements making civilisation possible is a judge or court that can decide who is right and and who is wrong, preventing BS from spiraling in endless retaliation and counter-retatiation.

Well, no? Isn't that what is called "war"? You might argue that frequency of conflicts is lower, though I would be sceptical of that without further proof.
Pardon the interruption! Before you read this thread please close another popup, don't forget to clap!
Gorbachev is on record as accrediting the cost of cleaning up Chernobyl/preventing something much worse as being one of the reasons for the collapse of the soviet union.

A conservative estimate would put over 1% of the working population of the USSR on site at some point in the cleanup/sarcophagus construction - and bear in mind the EU had to fund the construction of the second sarcophagus.

So ignore the human cost, which has vanished behind propaganda at the moment, just add up the energy it produced, and put that against the economic cost. Then hypothetically take all that effort, and research, and put it into alternative forms of clean fuel production....
The people that were very unfortunately necessary that deserve to be remembered are the 3828 "liquidators" that cleaned up the radioactive graphite (mixed with bits of reactor fuel/waste) that covered the roof above the reactor. In their own words[1]:

> [the remote control bulldozer] has overridden a graphite block with it's right caterpillar track, and now was sitting on 12,000 Roentgen fragment. [...] Starodumov was already thinking about something else... what all of us have already known: robots failed, and the extra radioactive zones will have to be cleaned by men.

> The shift lasted only two minutes. [...] Here, the unthinkable background radiation of nearly 8000 Roentgens. 20 meters away from us is the naked muzzle of the destroyed reactor. [...] With each succeeding group, with each fragment removed, the background radiation will reduce. This means the risk for the next group will already be lower.

[1] (this includes footage of the cleanup) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk
Myopic Rationality of Software Kludge
...I don't think that conclusion naturally follows from my suggested reasoning process.
The Peter Thiel recipe from Zero to One
Still works if your goal is generating heavy OLAP reports, and your reports can be calculated per-shard and then reduced at the end. If your query can be expressed in ten bytes, and the answer can be expressed in ten bytes, but in between there’s several TBs of data to run through in tons and tons of parallel-sequential passes that don’t involve any data that’s not already on the GPU, a GPU DBMS cluster seems optimal.

——

For more regular workloads, though, its seems like a proper GPU-targeted DBMS architecture wouldn’t use single “huge” GPUs, but rather would shard data (and thus workloads) across a cluster of commodity boxes with commodity GPUs, such that each GPU has just enough data held on it for query traffic to that GPU to barely saturate the PCI-e lanes.

Which is another way to say: maybe Intel’s Phi was ahead of its time. Consider a Phi as an entire computer (because it is, and you can program it as such), and a computer containing more than one of them as a cluster backplane with a shared SAN (because it is, and you can access it from the Phi’s as such.) I have a feeling this architecture will see a comeback, either in this form, or in the (roughly equivalent) form of backplane-connected clusters of highly-multicore Single-board Computers.
Manning allowed me to provide in pdf the Unit 0 and Unit 1.
Unit 0: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/8165fc_091580b11bc742c8830d29...

Unit 1: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/8165fc_a165a000ec444796b7e63c...
Couldn't this argument be applied to any living thing, not just the ones that humans have engineered? As soon as anything can mutate to enter a new niche, it will work the same way as this would.
Relevant quote that applies to most of the stories in this article: "but, he said, his difficultly finding a college-level job in the U.S. has made that debt oppressive nonetheless." The problem isn't just that students are graduating with debt, it's that they are graduating with debt and degrees that don't translate into actual good job prospects anymore.

I think it's also worth mentioning that the "leave the US for a cheaper/easier lifestyle elsewhere" choice isn't new. I met dozens of expats when I lived in China 15 years ago who were there because they could make ends meet and still have fun doing little more than teaching English. The only difference now is that if you ever come back to the US you're pretty much screwed.
You can short it: borrow, sell, and then buy back when the price drops to pay back what you borrowed.
The concrete details can crowd out the more abstract details you need to worry about, eg watching a concrete list of number being sorted doesn’t directly help someone grock the abstract structure of a sorting algorithm.
It's definitely undervalued by engineers themselves. I.e., the majority don't seem to treat this skill as a priority in their professional development. However, it's definitely not undervalued by the companies that hire them. Especially as they progress through their careers, where they will experience a glass-ceiling affect if they have not sharpened that skill.

EDIT: Fixed stupid autocorrect error (thanks sokoloff). I wish browser inputs had grammar hints as well as spelling correction.
It's a religious argument. The "death per MW" is a red herring.

A nuclear advocate will tell you that on a per-MW basis nuclear is safer from a "death from radiation" POV because your installer may fall off a roof or you might get knocked on the head by a loose panel. Conveniently, these "death per-MV" claims exclude the construction of the nuclear plants, the potentially thousands of years of waste containment and human labor associated with it.

You also need to price risk higher with nuclear because safety depends heavily on competent administration. That's expensive, and human failure is very common.

End of the day, the economics of nuclear are the problem. We would be building nuclear if they made money. In my state, nuclear plants need direct government subsidy (to the tune of billions) as they are unable to sell their electricity at a rate that sustains the plant. The capital costs are extreme and the plant needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
Well, not necessarily by hand. I never gave up deploying our Java application with Ansible. We could have used Docker but the team decided to use fat jars and Ansible instead. Nowadays with Java 11 you can make those fat jars even slimmer. There was no value proposition for us to change.
By "dozens of predatory banks" and "medical billing companies" you mean "the federal government" (who is owed 92% of student loan debt) and "hospitals and doctors offices" right?
This is awesome. Indeed, according to the mystical traditions, enlightenment is about realizing that it is all a grand illusion. (Though I would add, that in addition to "it just doesn't matter" it also matters very, very much!)
Not to say I don't appreciate how safe modern nuclear is, but if you're writing an article about the over-dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster, I think it hurts your argument when you neglect to mention the hundreds of thousands who were forced to permanently relocate and the thousand-square mile Exclusion Zone that is still uninhabitable 30 years later. If the disaster were at the nuclear plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Exclusion Zone would include all of Eastern Massachusetts, including the cities of Boston, Providence, and Worcester.
Reason never dictates we assume a negative because a positive is unprovable. We may consider a negative, but we would need evidence of it before believing the claim.
> He struggled to come up with the $300 a month he owed upon graduation

Don't most loan providers have income based repayment plans? You can just tell them "I can't afford this" and provide pay stubs. I think 15% of take home is standard.
Thanks for your insight. I was actually eyeing the "space systems engineering" degrees. If I did ever make a move I'd probably want to transition from the individual contributor software engineer to something higher level (like you say, systems level). Space seems super interesting from the outside looking in, but I supposed there is a lot of careful work involved given the higher stakes, which makes the process much slower than most software companies.

Probably won't actually make the switch, but just interested in seeing what's out there I guess.
> Cathedrals are alive.

Perhaps still technically alive, but comatose and strangled. Buildings are manifestations of purpose, and France, given its post-Revolutionary secularism, no longer shares in the purpose that drove the life and development of the building. With the purpose gone, the cathedral, while technically still operating as a cathedral, has been drained of much of its life force and essential importance. French society values the building for its mere historical importance and so as with an ancient Greek ruin has preserved it like a cadaver, either resisting any changes so that nothing is lost (thus tacitly admitting its impotence), or, as some propose, wish to make changes that aren't rooted in any essential function or purpose of the building. Unable to repurpose it, they are left to superficial architectural infiltration. Still others may wish to abolish the building altogether.
There’s too much focus on “gifted” folks and not enough on normal people. Normal people don’t have a champion in society.
I agree with the author that writing is one of the most undervalued skills for SWEs, but for a completely different reason - it forces you to reason things through properly, even if nobody else will ever read what you write.

Writing a couple of pages of design docs or an Amazon-style 6 pager or whatever might take a few days of work, but can save weeks or more of wasted implementation time when you realise your system design was flawed or it doesn't address any real user needs.
lol get wrecked son, I'm not doing your homework for you. do your own research
Predicting Bitcoin Price with AutoML Tables
The article specifically criticizes the arson conspiracy theory and indicates an electrical fire is far more likely.

"The alt-right hate crew roll in to blame the Muslims..."
I don't know about other tourists, but as a tourist myself, I like to visit cities that are clean and where I can easily get around using public transit. If I have to drive everywhere and there's lots of pollution, I pick someplace better to spend my time and money. In fact, the last thing I want to do in a foreign country is deal with driving a car: the traffic rules are all different (esp. in LHD countries), the customs different, and there's the question of liability. I don't even like touring American cities because of this (combined with the public transit being so awful), even though I live in this country; I'd rather go to Asia or western Europe where the public transit is excellent.
Excited to see some competition for Apollo. Apollo may do lots of things but exactly what and why and how remains a mystery to me. Apollo just feels needlessly large, opaque, and inadequately documented to me. Reading about urql, the combination of minimalist architecture with first class support for React hooks sounds like just what I'd been hoping would emerge.
Death from overwork being studied in Hong Kong
>keeps security people focused on externalities instead of getting real traction to effect the design and production of better products and systems.

A lot of the times the security people have their hands tied behind their back because a lot of these businesses don't consider security as an integral goal from the get go. All they want to do is fail fast and fail often and just get something out the door without considering security which then leads us to all sorts of ridiculous situations. This is what leads to a lot of these security professionals playing the game of "externalities" and doing the next best thing of mitigating the already poorly secured business instead of actually fixing it because it's already too late and it would "cost too much" to redo everything properly.
Isn't natural gas a huge CO2 source, at a time we kind of have an issue with CO2 concentration in the atmosphere? (genuine question)
Which is precisely why you don't want them inside your body, every alpha particle emitted by the delay will hit and be absorbed inside you, it is the worst. That's why the Russian chose Polonium to kill Litvinenko.
The more experience I get as an engineer, the more time I spend writing documentation, proposals, tutorials and the like.

This article is absolutely spot on when it points out that these skills become increasingly important as the size of an engineering organization grows.

The biggest challenges in engineering at scale (scale in terms of complexity and size of the team) are around communication. Good writing is how you scale your communication, especially if your team aren't physically co-located.

I don't think software engineers talk about or think about how to improve technical writing nearly enough.
Yes, parallel search is possible, but inefficient. Searching with e.g. 32 cores already cuts efficiency in half, in most useful scenarios (i.e., where the best move changes), and it gets worse from there.

But regardless, it seems you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how GPUs work vs. CPUs. GPUs "cores" are designed to run the same instructions on huge amounts of data simultaneously. So they're great for e.g. Photoshop filters where you have to do the same operations to each pixel of an image, or neural networks where you have to do the same operations on each value of a matrix. What they can't do is have each core running its own sequence of branchy, serial code on its own data, which is what chess engines do.

There's a reason why CPUs and GPUs are different products, and Intel can charge $1500 for a CPU with 16 cores whereas you can get an Nvidia graphics card with 768 cores for $150. It's because these cores don't do the same things.

You're right that game trees grow exponentially and that's actually the reason why GPUs are worthless. You can get a GPU to execute every possible sequence of chess moves from a given position--people have done that, and it's phenomenally fast. But that has a branching factor of ~35, meaning that for a search of depth 8, you have to visit 35^8 positions = 2251 trillion. If you're doing a serial search with modern optimizations, the branching factor is closer to 5, which means you have to search ~390 thousand positions for a depth 8 search. So for this relatively shallow search, a serial algorithm is almost 6 million times more efficient than a hypothetical GPU algorithm. (And that discrepancy gets worse the deeper you search.) There isn't a GPU with 6 million times more cores than a CPU...
GPT-2, the Destruction of the Web and Artificially Intelligent Textbooks
This is not a bad pitch
I always am bothered by these stories because they seem to imply the person matters more than the school.

I had mediocre grades and stats (#2 in class, 1500/1600) but I didn’t get into a prestigious school and went to my state school. The fact that I couldn’t even get into a top school appears to bode pretty poorly for my future if this is the criteria!
I did the same thing. Got by without really trying. Never went to lectures, studied for a month before the exams. Got 1st class marks.

But I didn't do it because I was lazy or because I wanted an easy life. I did it because I was afraid of failure, utterly terrified.

For smart people who come from less than loving families, fear of failure is the hardest thing to overcome.

It's such a shame because what I really wanted to do was research... Dreaming up new ways of doing things, but I just didn't stand out enough to get the chance because I did no work.

Now I am a jack of all trades who knows a little about a huge range of things. But I could do so much more if I didn't have to build crud apps every day, uch, kill me now.
This is refreshing upon first glance. The Apollo Client docs are such a mess.
Ok, so what are solar cells other than semiconductors that pretty rapidly wear out and need to be scrapped. Who is recycling these? Answer: no one. They’re going to be e-waste shipped off somewhere to seep cadmium and other harmful elements into the environment. The idea that nuclear is dirty, ignores the very real byproducts of current renewables.

At least nuclear energy centralizes waste. With renewables we’re spreading generation across a country, with little control of ensuring the materials are ever recycled in a responsible way.
What if existing fungi mutate and kill a billion of us? Is it actually likely, or are we just being afraid of taking any action?
Someone, somewhere was paid to do this. More likely, a team of people were paid to research and test different variations of branding natural gas and possibly test on live people.

I wonder how they feel about their jobs.
Aren't cancer cells made out of protein, carbohydrates, fats?
That was interesting. It continues for a little bit, but it soon falls apart:

$ pypy3 man.py
[33, 315, 3143, 31417, 314160, 3141593, 31415927, 7853981629]
> The dream of a “community for readers and writers” will never be realised as long as there is a cost to the hosting and VC money propping it up.

Here lies the true evil, VC funded startups destroying everything great about the web at the cost of nothing but growth.

We need to take back our communities and thrive on decentralised platforms and own our own data.

I urge HN to support ethical alternatives to these platforms: https://switching.social/
It’s a question of risk and cash flow. Internal IT infrastructure can represent far lower burn rates which may be an excellent tradeoff or a poor one based on several factors.

Are you spending your personal savings or a 100 million dollar funding round, etc.
The Collapsing Crime Rates of the ’90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones
Yeah like Edison (and Tesla).
It really is a trap, and it also doesn't provide the audience that it used to. It's annoying to users who aren't bought into their ecosystem (it shows popups trying to get you to log in when you just want to read blogs), it doesn't support syndication in any reasonable way (they have some broken RSS stuff that also includes comments, which is obviously wrong for blogs where the content should be prioritized) and any number of other problems. It's not syndicating to the widest number of readers, instead its locking you into their diminishing readership.

You really don't have to use Medium. It's trivial to get things indexed by Google if that's what you're worried about (generate a sitemap and submit it with their webmaster tools, everything is indexed shortly, or just write good content that gets linked from other places and those links will be followed), and you'll thank yourself later when Medium decides to arbitrarily kick you off, or goes out of business, or who knows what else that could cause you to lose access to your content because you don't own the domain.
Does anyone actually go to Medium to find content though? I don't think I've ever been on their homepage.
The only way for the society to learn is by doing. We need people who are gifted and have no grit and people who are not gifted but has.

Also don't tell every child they can become anything, they can not. I suggest telling them "they can do anything they set their mind to but they need to want it" that last part is the grit part, gifted people me as well hits a wall at some time in life where the rules and systems (job) do not fall naturally like coursework, here you have two choices stand up and do your job (just know, you will succed it just takes some more time than usual), or don't and be bad at your job and don't excell.

Whining about what you where not taught Fron society or parents gets you nowhere in life, but acceptance and perseverance does, atleas that's my experience.
Well, it looks like the programs this article is talking about are not so much "reforestation" as "delayed deforestation".
Show HN: Sine: Scalable Incomplete Network Embedding (ICDM 2018)
The tourism benefits of things like Notre Dame likely far outweigh the costs of maintaining them.
Building to linux was already supported. This is support for the editor.