skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ProPublica’s political ad monitoring tool (which Facebook fought) is alive again
Yeah but those pick your own fruit orchards are usually a really bad deal. Around here in Seacoast New England, for example apples, you are paying more for the privilege of picking your own apples then buying them at the supermarket.
The Bay Area is so sparsely populated it makes me depressed. Honestly, someone told me a few months ago he didn't want any more building in Cupertino because it was "overcrowded already". I was speechless. The people here are absolutely nuts.
> I seriously doubt it'll get any traction in the current climate.

We shall see.
Why is there an assumption that the tunnels have to be for cars? Create tunnels for bicycles instead:
- Tunnels don´t need to be nearly as big, and would still have higher capacity
- The friction of ¨I won´t ride a bike because it´s dangerous¨ is reduced or eliminated
- Weather as a factor in commuting by bike is eliminated
- Like a railway grade, you can basically eliminate any significant elevation ascents/descents
> in order to keep the warranty, you have to visit an Apple-approved repair center to have a specialist perform the upgrade, which costs more than doing it yourself

At least in the US (and presumably in the EU which is much better about this sort of stuff) this is not legal. You can upgrade it on your own and Apple still has to honor the warranty.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/ftc-s...
As the gp said though, you can enter those trades with a couple of years of apprenticeship, and I think you could do all the fun programming you desire on the side.

Is that something you could actually do?
De-Googled Android Experience
> As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times.

This is news to me - do you have examples? I'd be very interested in learning more.

>activists in its employee and management

Those are citizens, not government officials. And right now I'd be inclined to say that the average bay area Facebook employee's desires align very little with that of the federal executive branch of the USA, so this point doesn't work for me.

> Witness how every superhero movie now contains explicitly woke and feminist storylines.

And witness not only how you haven't been sent to xinjiang and reeducated for disagreeing with their values, but they weren't sent to xinjiang for producing media that's explicitly against the ruling executive and Senate party in America's value system.

The promotion of equality for men and women, besides, is a far shout to what is happening to activists in China.
You're conflating Musk's underground highway concept with his proposed solutions for cheaper tunnel construction. The latter is required for the former, but not vice-versa. Musk's 14-foot tunnels are large enough for a traditional subway. See my reply to the parent.
No normal non pro computer is a substantial improvement since 2013. Computers have been "good enough" for awhile.
The problem is that, statistically, nobody cares about the issues you raise. You can maybe get your problems addressed by a niche retailer, but Apple has bigger fish to fry.
The first article I linked to has links to the scientific sources.
It's a balance.

How many stories have we seen of failed startups after years of optimism? Sometimes the cost of that optimism for the founder was disturbingly high.

I have wasted multiple years trying to find solutions to software problems (e.g. when working with third party systems like browsers) that either were not solvable or that I lacked the skills to solve. I have had some wins too, but often I should have given up far earlier...
Yeah its also incredibly adaptive. You hardly know any specific interaction with anything you come into contact with on a daily basis, doesn't mean you hide in a bubble your whole life. The body deals with things as they come at it, thank evolution or we would have been extinct long ago. Every time our species moved to a new region we were introduced to completely new foods. GMOs are tiny variants of what we are already used to. I'm sure we'll do fine.

I'm curious to know though. What specific complexity are you worried about disrupting.
Without coming down on either side of this, because I'm not familiar with the proposals...

> 3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)

This is true, but doesn't really account for the fact that most categories of trips fall into this bucket in the aggregate. That is, people could skip any one of them, but skipping all trips in a category due to persistent traffic would extract a very real cost. (So in general, people bias toward taking all the trips in that category instead.)

Examples: commutes to work, where the cost of not going could be losing one's job. People will sit in a lot of traffic to keep a roof over their heads. That doesn't make it a good civic planning choice.

Others: lots of trips will involve healthcare, which is ~20% of the economy. Those have potentially high costs to skipping. Education-related trips are the same, as long as people are generally required to be physically present at their classes. After-school congestion is filled with children going to swim classes & track meets.

For many of these classes, the cost should be measured in terms of how many people would just leave the area if they couldn't afford the traffic cost of e.g. taking their kid to piano class.
> we had one of the most productive working relationships I've ever had

Finding a dynamic like this is a treasure.

My version of it was working with someone who had an inclination to solve all problems on the "algorithmic level" so to speak. Every time we worked on a feature, no matter how big, he would start with the hard CS problems and never really leave that head space. I thought of it as a "bottom up" approach. I on the other hand always took the "top down" approach and focused most of my efforts on APIs and architecture.

In his view, if you don't correctly solve the "real problem" (the hard CS problem) then everything else will fall part. If you base your architecture on the wrong solution then your layers of abstraction won't make any sense.

In my view, you should take the naive approach with the CS problem and focus mostly on the interface and system level architecture. If the interface and architecture are a mess, your application is going to be a buggy mess everywhere else too (death by a thousand cuts).

At first working together was so painful! We argued about everything. Worse, we'd be arguing about completely different things because our points of view were so different!

As soon as we recognized our differences we became a well oiled machine. A new project came in, he focused in on the CS problem, I focused on the architecture, and we'd (usually painlessly) merge our solutions.

The balance was even useful when we worked on separate projects. I knew that if I had a very narrow complex problem
then I could come to him for a brilliant solution. He knew that if he got stuck trying to design a system with lots of moving parts that I'd offer a solid robust and fault tolerant systems level solution.

Ah, I miss it.
Did you not eat chocolate? Did all of your anti-smoking friends had the urge to eat chocolate during breaks or social events? That’s a very odd characterization.

Smoking is banned for under 18 already, and affects others around you, while chocolate does not (an I really saying this?). As seen in the article, sugar is a bigger issue for the 4-18 age range. I’m sure your friends feel absolutely fine.
> But does conflict in itself negate continuity of society?

Perhaps we should ask the tens of thousands of families and cultures that were wiped out in endless war?
Theoretical fluid dynamicist here. I'm fairly decent with math, or at least solving differential equations. Related to the essay, I've always found it odd how many people with a CS background tend to "compute first, ask questions later." My experience has been that analyzing a problem first is generally a good idea, but CS folks typically don't in my experience. Exact or good approximate solutions to problems often exist, perhaps only for relatively simple problems, but still.

Sometimes computation is necessary, but that doesn't mean you'll save time by avoiding analysis entirely. When mathematical analysis succeeds, the time saved can be considerable. And you can combine both, e.g., recently I sped up a non-linear algebraic equation solver for my work by using an ansatz that I derived using the perturbation method. (Also probably helps the solver converge to the right solution.)

One possible explanation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_all_you_have_is_a_hammer,_...
ot: there's a really nice derivation in the first couple chapters of generatingfunctionology[0].

[0]: https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/DownldGF.html
There's a great paper about image labelling, written by an expert labeller: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3448

One interesting side to this is citizen science; websites like Zooniverse where you can get random members of the public to do your labelling. Technically there's little difference to what Scale does, just that it might be pictures of Pelicans or galaxies rather than cars on the road. In my experience what you're paying for with Scale is consistency. Zooniverse relies on the public being... Gaussian in quality - we needed something like twenty annotations per image I think.

People spend hours going through data and they don't get paid. On Zooniverse most of the data is boring, but the fun is the prospect of finding an unusual image. Some of the datasets are genuinely interesting (like the old ship logs). Many people say they enjoy the idea that they're contributing to science.

> Although pointless tedium is not the most important factor in rating a job, I think data labeling could well be along the most pointlessly tedious jobs ever created.

I don't want to pass judgement either way, but it's an interesting debate. These jobs have been around forever - data entry, for example, used to be (still is?) a fairly common unskilled job in first world countries. And tedium aside, you can at least work from home if you have a computer.

But where is the line? A lot of work I've seen on MTurk is transcription, for example. What about translation/subtitling services? These are labelling tasks in some way or another.
It's all too hard and usage never hit critical mass. Eg. why didn't you sign this post with your PGP key?

Hopefully it will become more mainstream one day. Perhaps the increase of faked images/video/etc. and the interest in blockchain for immutable records will start producing some change.
India has a big population and doesn't throw thousands of falun gong and Uighurs into reeducation camps, harvesting their organs at whim.

India has a big population and doesn't threaten the sovereignty of democratic nations like Taiwan.

I'm happy to acknowledge the good things happening in China and the advancements its made since the cultural revolution (of which my partner's mother can tell you stories of from her time in labor camps), but not when the objective is to try to sweep under the rug the massive crimes against humanity China is doing, right now.
While I agree that email is great for asynchronous communication and that asynchronous communication is a fabulous tool, the author completely ignores the benefits of IM.

If I have a question for my teammate and they happen to be in a meeting so I can’t ask them directly, I could email them. Let’s say they’re someone who checks email maybe once an hour or twice a day... not exactly going to get a quick response. IM allows me to message them, ask the question, get a response and move on. Something that needs a quick response doesn’t work great in either email or a meeting.

That’s one example of a possible benefit to IM. That being said, I think the issues with IM are cultural. We expect an instantaneous response so it’s “bad” to leave a message unread for a few hours. I think it comes down to coaching your teammates what situation warrants what type of communication.

It will never be perfect, we’ll always have these debates but we can educate each other on the most efficient ways for each other.
perhaps performing computations is to studying computation as observing the universe through a telescope is to studying it.
Can’t tell if srs or trolling
No I don’t it’s intentional. I suppose I should have written “pointless, tedious” instead.

I’m not sure how I would compare it to traditional blue collar low skilled labor jobs. Farm hand work, for instance, in addition to being physically difficult, is also surprisingly tedious contrary to what some people may imagine. But I think it is easier to understand why it is important work. If you don’t pick the berries, the berries die and nobody gets to eat them. If you’re a machine learning data labeler, you may believe that it’s creating a path to super intelligent computers. Or you may believe it’s a big waste of time. My acquaintances who did Alexa data labeling tended to lean towards the latter.
For networking mostly. People feel if you go to an elite college you will network with the elite, and this will come in handy. If you are going to a public state school, then people feel they will just be networking with cheap chumps and nobodies. It’s horrible.
Disk latency is a limiting factor of compile times for large projects.
The leading underscore on MacOS is part of the Mach-O standard [1]. This was inherited from a.out which really wasn't much of a standard per se but rather just a collection of a.out implementations [2]. Mach-O (1987) predated ELF (1993) and the later ELF abandoned the underscore as unnecessary.

[1] http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/devel/assembly/MachORuntim...

[2] https://www.nasm.us/doc/nasmdoc9.html
Yes, to me this is the very worst version of counter-culture. This isn't challenging the elite instititutions, it's even one step up the ladder, like some 70s hippie experiment of the privileged who roleplay as workers in some retreat in the mountains reading Plato. Gender segregation and overly strict "no alcohol" policies included. it's rebel roleplaying.

If people want practical experience and physical work the organisers of these institutions should go to Switzerland, learn how the apprenticeship system works and bring it back to America so people can be set on a viable career path.
I did this and have regretted it most of my life. Things are pretty great 10 years later, so I can’t complain too much, but I needed to get out of my home state to thrive.

The difference between my life there and my life when I said fuck this place and moved somewhere cool, outdoorsy, and away from all the baggage is night and day.
> Those are the optimistic failures you never hear about.

To be fair, you hear about that exact scenario constantly on HN. It's a common topic here. I've been reading stories about it here for the better part of a decade now. Pretty much every thread that touches on success, failure and survivor bias end up with discussions covering the issue of entrepreneurial blindness due to eg over-confidence or over-optimism.

You also frequently see entire threads dedicated to the subject, spawned from articles posted by entrepreneurs that put themselves through blind optimism scenarios and then go on to warn against it. Knowing when to throw in the towel, when to stop trying to pivot, and so on, are common themes with founders. You'll run across some really good discussions on the subject here over time.
What if you live in the tropics?
That seems like it just pushes all the bugs into the “uninteresting” parts.
Five years ago Lenovo did a ThinkPad with a similar touchscreen replacement for the Fn key row. It was not well received.

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/thinkpad-x1-carbon-2014-s...
The oled touchpad is ridiculous. I never use it “as intended” and it wrecks my function key muscle memory. My laptop is actually expanding because of the battery. I’d like at least a dock that does decent, active cooling.
> This person clearly never worked in a remote or distributed team.

I actually worked 3 years in a 100% remote, international startup, later to acquired by Nvidia. :P
Yeah, they said that in 2017 -- four years after it was introduced in 2013 and left to languish.

And even then, you had to cross your fingers and hope that what they came up with would be good for you. (And based on the pricing of the new Mac Pro compared to the old ones, there's probably a lot of people for whom it won't be a good replacement.)
Biggest annoyance with the iMac though is you can’t, say, work from home with your work laptop and plug it into the screen.

This is another case with macs where the situation 8 years ago was much better since they used to have target display mode. From what I understand, they killed it because they needed to use a custom format to drive the 5k screen initially. Now regular DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 have enough bandwidth for it but there’s been no mention of bringing the feature back.
Hard to believe a gaming company in 2019 puts out promo material, even (especially?) marketing hype material, about their vision for the future of gaming, and never once even utters the words virtual reality.
Not to say anything about the central thesis of the post, but the two examples of how deeper mathematical knowledge can lead to better programming are just terrible examples. As someone whose background was originally mathematics and starting programming relatively late, I can very much relate to thinking Binet's formula for Fibonacci numbers or gamma function for factorials might be faster than recursive methods. But when you actually learn about how ints, floats and their arithmetic is implemented at a low level, how cache and memory works etc, you realise that recursive methods for those two problems are actually your best bet, both for speed and accuracy. So ironically, these are examples where knowing much about low level coding and computing architecture helps you more than knowing more advanced mathematics.
Startup feels instant to me. Perhaps you are talking about precompilation. In that case, it’s insignificant for most computationally intensive applications.
Not to mention steel coming in that's radioactive from India and China.What a way to get rid of radioactive waste.
Releasing a hilariously overpriced and ugly computer that can cost as much as a new car and might appeal to a niche of a niche, to me, doesn’t really demonstrate any change in direction. (I love how people keep saying “the most powerful Mac ever”. Ok, but the laptop I bought 7 months ago for 2k has about the same amount of power as the base 6k Mac and it’s not housed in a giant garish cheese grater)

I say this as a person that bought exclusively macs from 2009 - 2015 but they don’t have a single computer I even remotely want at the moment.
It actually doesn't prefix all symbol names as such! The underscore prefix indicates the cdecl calling convention specifically; other calling conventions have their own name mangling schemes.

Edit: I had a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something, and I was. This is only a Windows convention, not a more universal thing.
In the general case (for values of n bigger than double precision floats support), the Binet formula is slower.

The author’s proposed solution only works up to n = 78. If you want to speed up the calculation for small values, just cache them all.
You seem to be assuming both my preference and age.

I'll allow that some of it may be generational; many of my younger colleagues have never called in to a conference call.

But I challenge your claim that I'm assuming bad faith. At no point did I question the motives of the OP, only their actions.

Edit: I should clarify, because my original comment could reasonably be read as assuming details about the internal motivations of the OP. Allow me to rephrase: if a mangers' default response to an individual not having a camera on is to dress down the person for not "being present", that manager is making a toxic workplace environment.
That's temporary. It goes away during long term ketosis. I've been in ketosis for over a year and have found my endurance to be fine but my top end power to be decreased (cycling). I'm still competitive but I think if I was eating carbs I could add ~20% to my max power based on historical numbers.
Yes. It is more understanding which library to choose or which eco.
The IM system I would like to see would be intended to be used like a very lightweight bug tracker. It would be very thread-heavy, and a toplevel would correspond one-to-one with a task/bug/question. Obviously you can do all that with Slack today; the difference is that when a conversation is done, it can be marked closed and not show up in the view that you see. (Obviously you would be able to reopen it or find it again with search.)

In other words, the default view is a list of every conversation still relevant to you and your team, rather than an infinite-scrolling history.

EDIT: Hey, Zulip sounds much like what I want!
Semi-off topic but is there a curated "best of" list for systems papers like this that anyone knows about, from Google or otherwise?
No they aren't. If Apple were listening, we wouldn't be expected to shell out $6000 for a machine where we're going to have to disable half the cores (and lose 40-60% of the remaining performance) to achieve "it might work" security (until the next Intel vuln is found). If Apple were listening they wouldn't be selling a freaking monitor stand for $1000. If Apple were listening, they wouldn't be forced to abandon bash because they can't be bothered to actually comply with the GPL (v3). Nobody can justify Apple at this point and the sooner it dies, the better.
It’s not for you. The market that it is for are chomping at the bit to buy one.

But as far as it’s “garish appearance”, that’s exactly what Pro’s were asking for something that didn’t put form over function.
> mixing multiple cultures, religions and belief systems is harmful to the identity and the self-trust of a nation

This is true only if the peoples of a country refuse to mix and to seek a common national civic identity based on peaceful resolution of disputes and respect for the rights of minorities, whether cultural or religious.

It remains true that one thing no democracy can survive is a large fraction of citizens with contempt for the values that make self-government possible: respect for the rule of law rather than of strong men; a desire to help people who cannot return the favor, to list a few. This does indeed go to your "belief system" point.

But here in the US anyway, I'd suggest most of the rot of the civic belief system has been grown right at home.
Thanks for sharing. I'd like to read your guide about being social. Did you mean to add a link?
Here's the text of #6: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

My thought is not to restrict anyone from doing anything. Rather that, for example, any profit-seeking entity can use any code, but that that profit-seeking entity must pay a standard and proportional fee to the license-holder of that code, generally its author(s) and/or maintainer(s).

Does that qualify as "restricting anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor"? Going by the wording, I would lean toward "no".

Furthermore, while on that page I glanced at the other paragraphs, and I couldn't help but notice that according to #9: "License Must Not Restrict Other Software" and its text: "The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.", the GNU/GPL don't qualify as "open source" software.

It is to laugh.