skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately I have to strongly disagree with the author's central thesis.

> But I think that most programmers who are serious about what they do should know calculus (the real kind), linear algebra, and statistics. The reason has nothing to do with programming per se — compilers, data structures, and all that — but rather the role of programming in the economy...One way to read the history of business in the twentieth century is a series of transformations whereby industries that “didn’t need math” suddenly found themselves critically depending on it.

There are two ways to interpret the claim that more programmers should know advanced math. One of them, which the author preempts, is the idea that programmers will improve their own work through significant mathematical maturity. It seems the author and I already agree that isn't the case, so I won't address this interpretation. But I still consider this interpretation to be more defensible than the other one.

The other way to interpret it, which the author seems to be explicitly pushing, is that programmers with a strong mathematical background will be better situated to proactively find fertile areas of the economy which can be improved through a combination of computing and advanced math. I don't believe this is realistic. None of the author's specific examples - control theory, optimization, linear programming, econometrics, or Black-Scholes - were pioneered by generalist engineers with a strong grounding in mathematics. They were just applied mathematicians (and in a few of those cases, repurposed pure mathematicians).

Likewise the bar is constantly rising. Knowing calculus, linear algebra and statistics won't empower you to make significant, groundbreaking improvements to any major field. That knowledge is necessary but insufficient. What's considered low hanging fruit these days is something that could be conceivably noticed and tackled by a postdoc. Mathematics itself is ossifying as a field of specialists, to the point where prominent researchers within subfields like algebraic geometry can be unfamiliar with each other's principal work.

This is really why find the appeal to economic advancement less than convincing - every advancement the author mentions has an implicit foundation in specialization. Historically, the most notable advancements in technology have come about through division of labor and cross-pollination. You would be better served by having two collaborating teams of mathematicians and engineers than by a team of engineers who know undergraduate math. It's already common for applied mathematicians to be able to program competently; they dominate the authorship of fast, low level math libraries. If you need them, hire them.

Conversely, I would argue we should actually reduce the education for more developers, not add even more material to it. Most developers already don't need to learn a significant amount of the material in a standard computer science degree. Piling on math courses isn't going to be a fundamental improvement for the vast majority of engineers working on real world software.
Short pauses to collect your thoughts? Sure. Routinely placing 30s pauses between statements? No, it's not acceptable to most people. 30s is a really long time in verbal communication. Grab a stopwatch and try letting 30s run out between statements.
$800b is the GDP of the Bay area..
Context is the crux of it all IMO. We try this with our kids. It doesn't work all that well. They have to have some context or experience to understand what the advice means as for myself, I would have a difficult time blindly acting on advice without understanding and unfortunately, hitting a wall with your head is a very good lesson.
Most people who work in tech? Do you think the number of Google engineers with a degree is above or below 50%. Take a guess.
> If anything, speaking is marginally slower.

I disagree – typing at 100 wpm is exceptionally fast even for tech workers, and speaking at 150 wpm is normal. Have you ever tried to transcribe a conversation in real time? It's hard, which is why stenotype machines were invented to allow trained users to type at over 200 wpm.
That'll work nicely as long as your local machine has a GPU that supports CUDA. If not, you can either train on CPU and wait an eternity, or follow the AWS EC2 setup steps further up on that page.
Prevention to 100% would be costly. They have diminishing marginal returns.

Why would someone pay $50,000/year for a hypothetical system which would theoretically catch everyone and fill out the police report automatically when the store experiences a tiny $300 annual shrinkage loss?
Not sure what exactly the author does, but IM is the absolute life saver in every developers world. E-Mails are spammy, include too many people, are too long, take too long to write, get drowned in a sea of useless crap, etc... Everyone working in a bigger corporation, knows that emails are a major time sink.

Video calls? Sure, if there is a meeting. But video calls, not matter what software you use, is a nightmare. The quality is crap, the connection lags and it never feels anything close to real life interaction...

But most importantly, IM let's you respond on your own time. There is nothing worse that people talking to you or calling you with a video call while you are trying to figure out why that statemachine recursed into the 20th method call and then jumping this way and that way, suddenly jumped the wrong way and then still produced the correct result while thinking about how it got into the 20th call in the first place when it should have branche din the 10th call... You get the picture.
I’m pretty happy with mine too, but mine isn’t used daily, just when the Mini has an issue or I go out of the (home) office and need to work.
While in this particular Hong Kong protest case, it was influenced by the west (or western values).

So my only point is that the west has caused more troubles than ever for the world. (Which is why I go on and talk about the wars etc)

Perhaps I am wrong, it was the history written by someone else.

> Massacres and atrocities are no easy things to discuss. I've spoken to survivors of the holocaust in Europe, and the Rwandan genocide, you have obviously not heard anyone participating in Tiananmen square talk about the events? It's very hard to talk so lightly about massacares when you have heard personal anecdotes and the hard ships that the people went trough.

I don't talk about this at all. (not that I am cold hearted if the impression I left for you was such, I am sorry)

edit: I made a mistake, I mean I don't talk about the details of massacres and atrocities. I just mentioned the title of them.
"They"? "Them"? The government is us.

But I agree with you about the building restrictions.
I'm giving up my spec'd out Macbook Pro 2015 over my cold, dead body.
I spent my childhood and formative years playing adventure games. While I played more Maniac Mansion than the sequel, this is one of the best.
I am currently in a mostly burned-out, warzone-looking Paradise (nearly all other houses around burned, and many tall trees have been resource-exploited removed without recompensing property owners) when PG&E cut the power at 9 pm last night and only restored it around 3 pm today. It seems like safety virtue-signaling because ground foilage is still green, humidity isn't low, wind isn't high and the temperature will be hotter in the next few days. If anything, it will happen again.

As an aside, all hardware stores in Chico were out of generators; we had to go to Red Bluff to pick one up. Should've done it sooner, proactively but I'm having to care for a disabled family member.
The problems with “places that save knowledge” is that they are chronically out of date. A cool Slack feature would be to create digests from starred and tagged posts that everyone can access.
I doubt that the shareholders care about the new Mac Pro. It won't move the needle as far as revenue and profit.

I also doubt that they care about improvements to SiriKit, the Audio APIs, and SwiftUI....
I find it hard to believe that they got into the industry to play stock market for games, haha.

I am wondering if Beth is planning on their own platform next, Microsoft is definitely making those moves . . .

I think the new meta is a cycling people around content releases, hopefully within your ecosystem, but np if not, because they will cycle back for the next updates.

It's the wild wild west again, baby.
Yes, there are already a couple.

The most well known is a 100% Julia neural network library called Flux.jl [1], which aims to become what Swift for Tensorflow wants as well (to make the entire Julia language a fully differentiable language) through Zygote.jl [2], and even without it has already great integration with the ecosystem, for example with the differentiable equations library through DiffEqFlux.jl [3]. Plus the source code is very high level (while being high performance, including easy GPU support), so you can easily see what each component does and implement any extension directly on your code without worrying about performance.

There is also another feature complete native library that allows some very concise code, Knet.jl [4], and the Tensorflow bindings [5].

[1] https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl

[2] https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl

[3] https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq

[4] https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl

[5] https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl
The iMac 5k and Pros dont get enough love. They look great, are blazingly fast, and the display is ridiculously good. But i suppose the Pro is post-2017.
Apple's desktop options are actually quite strong right now.

If you just want a really powerful desktop computer for dev work - get a souped up Mac Mini
If you want it with a nice screen - get an iMac Pro
If you're a video professional - get a Mac Pro

The Macbook Pro keyboard situation is a garbage fire, though I will say that I'm quite happy with my 2016 keyboard after it got replaced for free through the program.
Sure - working great for somebody like Marco who’s already loaded.
If by "botched things up" you mean "Made affordable." Nobody other than Vint Cerf will argue that circuit-switched networks are not superior from a QoS point of view, but they can be orders of magnitude more expensive to build and maintain.
You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro).

The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs.

You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
Gates (and Zuckerberg) went to Harvard, and would probably have had a much harder time getting venture capitalists to take them seriously if they did not have Harvard on their resume. They aren't proof that college doesn't matter, they are proof that an elite college matters a lot, but graduating matters a lot less simply than attending and getting access to the network.
Correct. By definition, if volume is high enough, an FPGA will always lose to a custom chip. That's why it feels like FPGAs are always about to win, except they never do because for every real use case, someone will make a better chip.

In other words, the overhead of the re-configurable aspect of FPGA is just too high.
This game captured a magical point in gaming where me my brother and my mother were playing on our PC, and my cousin and uncle were playing on another at the same time, keeping each other up to date on progress.

We all were blocked at the same point until my uncle found the puzzle where you have to close a door to get the keys, and as soon as he found it he phoned my mom and we all progressed.

That type of puzzle discovery hasn't happened since. Amazing game and amazing memory.
> oftentimes not respecting our old traditions.

Can the govt do something like introduce culture lessons for new immigrants?
I’m working and doing a side project and there are some more advantages:

I work as a web dev. I can legitimately learn on the job. That learning then benefits the side project. Example: typescript, shell, k8s, css etc.

I have less time on the side project so there is less fluffing. No docs, no unit tests, no Haskell, just getting it done with what I am proficient at. This might ironically mean I get more done than if I was full time as I’d be tempted to gold plate.

I’m exhausted when I get home and the code I write then just (about) gets the job done. It’d fail interviews big time though.
Take 3 quarters of a hundred billion and you can probably substantially reshape land use in even the Bay Area. Take the other quarter and you can probably substantially reshape BART.
One of my pieces of advice I'd like to send back in time would be to prevent someone else killing themselves.
In the future, I really don't think the vast majority of software engineers will need to know any abstract algebra in order to use or write software with strong formal guarantees. The history of software engineering (and most engineering disciplines in general) is a narrative in which practitioners need to know less theory as time goes on.

I expect that formal methods will become another specialization that most engineers don't need to directly work with, alongside things like cryptography and low level arithmetic.
Yes you can! The "mix" part is key. It's the sequential learning which screws up networks today. If you randomly sample from tasks you're fine, or if you can replay older tasks while you're learning new ones (essentially another form of random sampling) the network can learn multiple tasks. But the moment you drop a task from a distribution of training data you're going to start losing competency on it. By default neural networks don't have mechanisms to protect data (weights) from being over-written.
Agreed, I was mistaking thinking about land values and public transportation within an urban area, not including commuter transit to suburbs.
How to Clear the Browser History of Your Mac
I'm an academic so I'm biased. Administration is out of control but I think there would be some real benefits to free or drastically cheaper college education in the USA. There are studies that have shown that the more educated you are the less likely you are to commit crime (of course there is the old correlation vs causation question) and other issues so it would benefit society to offer cheaper education.
Another commenter linked to the remastered (hi-res) version for desktop, but it's also available for iPad for $4.99... and if tablets aren't the perfect medium for original point-and-click adventure games then I don't know what is:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/day-of-the-tentacle-remaster...
You love it more than the 2015 MBP?
Maven and Gradle don't run anything in a dedicated JVM. They're just tools to accomplish various goals based on your dependencies: compile, package, test, maybe deploy. Not even remotely similar to runtime module management like you get in OSGi.
Recognise the power of the white coat (to most) and use it wisely.
I've noticed the people who dislike IM tend to be weaker communicators in general.

Compared to email, IMs tend to have less context and are generally short and to the point but otherwise unstructured. There's a pressure to respond quickly, and part of responding quickly is typing less words. Condensing thoughts to a minimum number of words is a harder skill than it seems; people tend to compensate for low quality communication with more words. Then there's still all the drawbacks of email: typing proficiency, spelling, grammar, and asynchrony.

Compared to mouth words conversations, IM doesn't have inflection or body language to help with tone. It's also not as fast as live conversations so it's easier losing context and easier to get overwhelmed with multiple conversations happening concurrently.

I personally love IM because it's easier to have multiple simultaneous conversations with more throughput and less latency than email normally achieves. I think of IM like async programming, when one conversation gets blocked, I can work on another. Mouth-to-mouth communication is like a singled threaded I/O, you're wasting resources (time) when you're blocked, but if you're not blocked you're more efficient since there's no context switching (so a heavily one sided conversation/lecture). Email is like multithreading, context switches are more expensive and the amount of work done per context switch needs to be big enough for it to be worthwhile. They all have merits and use cases.
It's not about sharing track. It's about having to go to mezzanine level to transfer vs going out the landing after one flight of stairs.
Definitely, my parents had been married 35 years at the time (now 50 years) and they were high school sweethearts. So yeah, I guess I felt behind.
About 20x but we're not quite there yet.

https://youtu.be/WtAPUsGld4o
>What are the alternatives?

This is exactly the right question.

Assuming that the goal is a reduction in atmospheric CO2, there are many alternatives that are at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective. Of those, more land based wind and solar plants are for now the best. The cost of land generally is almost negligibly small - about 0.4% of total for a recent project I looked at. Admittedly, this was in Australia, but given that solar power stations cost circa $0.5 million per hectare in equipment and installation, land (rural land of course) would need to be pretty expensive before it became a significant factor.
I manage a medium sized team of developers, many of whom often work from home. IM is our communication lifeline. I couldn't imagine having to phone or email them 100 times a day, what a nightmare.
I have no idea. We mostly glossed over it in class, but I had been given a copy of Gödel Escher Bach at some point so I dove a little deeper. My personal preference is Nagel's book which is short and clear (and you can probably find a digital version)
Off topic, but seeing as you seem to have read some: where should one start with Knausgaard? I've been hearing more and more about him, and want to get a taste, but don't know where to start.
I agree with everything you’re saying, but FWIW the article seems to be accusing colleges of being too “careerist” and offers basically the opposite of college AND trade school, a philosophical exploration without a particular emphasis on vocation.
Eh, with the scale of GoT, GRRM has to go slow. There are 150 main characters in GoT, but 2000 in all the books mentioned.

You can't rush a story of this scale, just look what happened when HBO tried, and they were only using a fraction of the actual story.

The entire cast/story of HL could fit within the first couple chapters of GoT, but that's the point of GoT.

GRRM wanted to make something on a crazy scale, so it's hard to compare his progress with the source guys' inability to ship games.

After sampling e3, the future is looking pretty bright.

I am starting to see why everyone is holding out on vr. We haven't even scratched the surface in fidelity. Fidelity = presence.

Cyberpunk2077, Doom Eternal, Elden Rings, and Halo Infinite all look incredible.
What about the trackpad though?

I just can't get over how inferior everyone else's trackpads are.
The key action to getting Ben Franklin his thunderstorm was a bit too much, no?
Imagine if the stairs to BART weren't separated by a cage from MUNI. How on earth is it reasonable to force someone to the ground floor when going between floors 1 and 2?
> This is a known issue in the security industry and has been for a while but fixing it is a hard problem.

I've never heard of Shodan, it seems like a valuable service and seems like you care. I'm not in the 'industrial control systems space', but am in an industry which is 'sensitive'.

The 'last line of defence' is often audit. Are you able to reach out to auditors (Big4) and regulators and educate them on this service (audit often have a financial background, CPA etc, and it's rare to find an auditor with a deep technology understanding, and MBA programs, which a lot of company heads might have taken, tend to lack anything very information technology technically - basically finance rooted)? I'm thinking this could be a business development route for a valuable service; make it a win-win for them too.
I have so many good memories of playing this game with friends back in the 90s. I played it again recently with my teenager nephews and they loved it. The humor still works and the puzzles are challenging.
This is not a simple communication breakdown, it's assuming bad faith without any evidence. That is a red flag of a toxic work environment. Don't let your manager gaslight you.
This was very much a theme of the way we were taught, there is no possible way to go into anything in depth in a lecture, if something sparked interest then we were supposed to read up on it, write a paper, and get criticized. Some classes had reading lists with well over a hundred books on them
I immediately thought the article was about some kind of Panama Papers but regarding 3M Corp :b
> or form the foundation for the next stage of your life

What does that mean?

> you're really undervaluing that money if you use it just to live whilst creating a business.

What would be more valuable use of that money? Do you just mean keeping it in savings account or in index fund and let the interest build up?
A big issue with IM is that you rely on the passive “status” string, and:

- This feature sadly is buggy as hell in some popular implementations. People can appear “Online” one minute and “Away 2 hours” the next (!?!?), presumably from bad syncing code.

- I’ve seen that colleagues vary greatly in their interpretation of status strings. Some people will ask detailed questions using an IM when I am clearly “in conference call” or “in meeting” (or some other “of COURSE I’m busy, damn it!!!” statuses).

Ultimately, the problem with IM is that the “importance” of any given issue between Person 1 and Person 2 is not the same. This means, if I am really busy, I would rather be marked “Away” because frankly nothing else (short of signing off completely) is going to give me the tranquility required to finish a critical task.
Being the exception to the rule doesn’t mean it’s common or the best way into a particular field though.
ZFS is the only filesystem I've ever had completely crap out on me without any indication of a hardware issue[1]. I don't recall the error message I got currently, but asking around about it on the various ZFS irc channels the answer was invariably "I hope you have backups" This was probably a fluke, but did sour me a bit.

1: Btrfs refused to mount at one point due to a bug; the helpful folks on #btrfs walked me through the process of downgrading my linux kernel to get it into a working stat eagina. At this point I switched away from btrfs.
Cyberpunk 2077 Full Presentation with Keanu Reeves
FedEx dumps Amazon from air cargo service as rivalry grows
Joe Biden said it himself, he didn't like how elitist America is becoming. I couldn't agree more and couldn't be happier to see people choosing a career in the trades. They can be high paying and stable.