skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But then again what's your alternative ?

I don't wish for an alternative to "sustainable" living, just to be clear. Only I doubt people will voluntarily give up all the amenities of our unsustainable way of living.

> Wait until "technology" saves us ?

Is that really too far fetched? Like "technology" saved us from food shortage [0], bacterial infections [1], horse manure [2] and so much more.

Technology like airplanes also saved us from being unable to leave our home town in a lifetime.

Today's problems are mostly side-effects of yesterday's solutions, often accelerated by greed and selfishness.

> If the human race prefers autodestruction over self restraint, let it be.

Maybe the next iteration of intelligent life on this planet is less selfish and more sensible? Less prone to social traps [3]?

> You better start planning the pitch you'll give to your grandchildren

That's not a pitch. If that happens, it's more like "We fucked it up, we're going to die. End of the story". Nothing someone needs to buy. No one "pitched" the demise of the Ancient Rome to the people. It was just inevitable, yet painful.

> this one will be much more of a hard sell than mine

It would be a more fateful talk than yours, but your's is a big one to sell:

"We've identified a bunch of problems, like nuclear weapons and climate change. Climate change is the only thing, YOU personally can do something about. So, yes, you would be able to buy an iPhone every year, watching TV on a big plasma while bbq-ing pulled beef and fly to any beach you can dream of just to get plastered with cheap beer over there, BUT we take ALL this away from you to save the planet. You can emit only as much CO2 as the poorest people in the world do. Yes, we try to reinvent all this stuff from scratch, but in a sustainable way, but this could take ages - if it happens at all. We don't really believe in technology, which is why we need to take it away from you NOW, but we hope for the best.

The nuclear weapons and stuff, you ask? Yes, we talk to the world leaders. They are unregenerate at the moment, but YOU will join us for the good cause, won't you?"

My point here is not that we would not be better off, if we all lived sustainable. But taking a single threat to humanity out of a big list of threats and conventionalise the one with the solution imposing the biggest cuts on an individual level, to the most detrimental one, might do more harm than good.

And, according to science, every cut above these 0.6-1.2t per capita per year would just delay the catastrophe to the grand-grand-children. So, yes, this would sound a bit like "middle ages" to most people.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_productivity

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap
The research in the OP is only for stars that are like the Sun.
Even if you do have to "grind leetcode", at least that gives you the skills to get almost any tech job with very small marginal investment.

Once you get very good at leetcode-style questions, just apply anywhere and get an onsite with a one-hour interactive technical screen, that will also tell you about the sort of people and culture that employer has.

Conversely, homework assignments can easily take 5-10 hours. There's a lot of desperate unemployed people out there taking 10+ hours for these tasks, and setting the bar really high. A busy professional can be hard pressed to invest 5 hours they can ill-afford coding this task after a full day at work, then get rejected because some unemployed applicants dedicated 20+ hours for the same task.

There are also services that solve these tasks for you, so now you - a busy professional - are competing against hordes of people who do these tasks all day every day for a living.

So you hard-scramble 4-5 hours to finish a take home assignment to apply to just one place (!), and then you send it in and get a meaningless rejection note. Sometimes you don't get anything at all.

These are some of the reasons I'm never completing a homework assignment again.
The past decade has proven that central banks can keep a system afloat for a decade. It remains to be seen if it proves anything else.
Over in the UK parliament, grabbing the mace has almost become a trope of renegade MPs. It's a big emergency stop button on proceedings as it represents the monarch's authority and without it parliament has no power.

Most famous are Michael Heseltine, or Oliver Cromwell a couple of years before the UK's brief experiment with republican dictatorship.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/10/day-of-brex...
It's a small step in the grand scheme of things... But it's a huge step (and commitment) coming from a single company.

I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view.

Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys.

As a side note: I personally think that the way we look at environment and impact is plainly wrong. E.g. it is much more effective to plant trees (called "afforestation") rather than sequester CO2. Here's some old but decent sources [0], [1]. Can't find a proper source, but afforestation, when done together with habitat restoration, can be even cheaper than these numbers, when done in certain areas of Africa, South America and Central Asia.

If Stripe wants to go the proverbial extra mile, it should consider "educating" people on the subject AND take consequent action, as opposed to "just" taking action following conventional wisdom.

[0]: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf

[1]: https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf (afforestation "price" starting at ~$50/ton)
What do you mean by "good approximation"? Arbitrarily close?

Can you give an example of such a function? They very well may exist. But I think we can agree that non-differentiability of the target function is not sufficient.

The function that describes the neural network itself has to be differentiable. Whether we can create a differentiable function/NN for any kind of input remains to be shown.
Eh? That assumes oil production is static. We have effectively infinite resources of fossil fuels still yet to be extracted.

That's like saying you can reduce car miles driven by buying a car and not driving it. Another one will just be made.
Apple files lawsuit against Corellium for iOS emulation
Oh, those are costs of hiring someone, not just the firing.

And I said earlier I maintain that my method of interviewing will actually reduce those costs.
There is a wealth of data now that shows fertility declining with increased standard of living. (Lots of correlations obscure the exact causations, but among the correlations is female economic and social mobility.) Your example is an eminently plausible mechanism for the spread of high fertility via either genetic or social vectors - but given that it contradicts the data, I don't see how it can be any more than an anecdote. Perhaps the grandchildren of large families are sufficiently removed to revert to the social mean? I don't know.

As for the Black Death, the personal and societal restrictions that result from not wanting to die from casual contact were probably quite a relief to escape and reverse. I don't know enough about history, but I could imagine that kicking off a positive chain reaction. After a cold season, people love to play in the sun.

This part is just speculation on my part, though; you're welcome to continue siding with Thanos.
Huh, I guess Apple was on to something. Who would have thought!
> So what's your solution? You have to put in something, and putting in the real maiden name seems like the worse option to me.

Instead of a gibberish generator (ala password managers' defaultly-generated passwords), use a _word generator_. Something like "correct horse battery staple" except, you know, not the popular words.

Then, of course, make sure to include those secrets in your password manager.
Meritocracy is like race: a myth. It doesn't exist. It's different groups of people split along arbitrary societal boundaries, decided by people with poor ethics and conflicts of interest. After all, nepotism isn't illegal, it takes many forms, and it just so happens to explain a whole lot about the distribution of resources and opportunities.

Back before she fell off the deep end, Roseanne had one of the most insightful lines I had ever come across: "The object of business is to keep your buddies working, even if they’re fuckin’ idiots." Keep this in mind and the world makes a lot more sense.

https://classic.esquire.com/article/2001/3/1/what-ive-learne...
I work in NLP and the industry has pretty much completely shifted to DL based approaches (ie. translation vendors pretty much only use neural engines now, language modeling and classification is very often neural as well now).

There's definitely a lot that's not quite ready for prime time (reinforcement learning comes to mind as something that is particularly promising but not working really yet).

> It's not that DL is simply "rebranded statistical methods", it's that the companies with names ending in "dot AI" are simply using "rebranded statistical methods". Lots of money is being poured into anything that calls itself "AI" right now, and a lot of people are starting to roll their eyes when they hear that term.

This is definitely true - but I took it as a bit different from your original comment.
That rule, justified in the wikipedia article, is a double edged sword. It allows me to sue a large corporation without the fear that I'm going to run up a million dollar bill because they insist on the best lawyers. Under a system where I have to pay if I lose, I'm not going to want to sue unless I'm 100% sure I'll win, as opposed to just 51% likely under the american rule. Sure, it sometimes leaves people footing the bill for the defense of frivolous lawsuits but it also enables more people to seek justice.

What it is not is a flaw on checks and balances between the branches of government.
The article is about European forestry research. There's no indication here that those researchers aren't intimately familiar with US forestry research; however, they did provide a causal explanation for these fires (i.e. climate change) and did not indicate that any further causes needed to be identified.

Again, what you're saying, while possibly true and if true probably accounted for, isn't necessarily relevant, as climate change by itself is a sufficient explanation of this phenomenon.
Do you know if they’re doing this to people with mobile cells as well or is it only landlines?
Exactly my case! So I have a cronjob that compares the current IP with the previous one and, if different, sends an API request to update the DNS record.
Please link to three of those studies.
I like to imagine a tribal villages before civilization went into overdrive. That’s the lifestyle humans originally adapted to. I imagine that in the village, there are niched personalities. One guy is way spiritual and offers guidance and spiritual support. Another is a warrior spirit, always eager to conquer and to gain more resources for his village. A third is the carpenter. Society today must accommodate these same people types, or they’ll feel out of place. It’s okay if you (like me) don’t respond to the Don Quixote type narrative; I think it sounds naive, but it’s always easy to be a critic.
> The U.S. has sought to derail Chinese efforts to gain an economic foothold in Greenland. The Pentagon worked successfully in 2018 to block China from financing three airports on the island.

This is where the story takes a dark turn.

Global warming and the reduction of arctic sea ice is making this marginally interesting place more interesting all the time. In 10-20 years Greenland could become the center of a power struggle among countries seeking to obtain it.

Would the US allow China or Russia, for example to buy it? No need to sell the whole thing, either - how about a few tens of thousands of square miles? What if countries started pressuring Denmark to part with some or all of Greenland through various channels?

How would such advances be perceived by the US and how far would the US go to prevent it?

Of all the crazy ways for WWIII to start, a land grab over Greenland would be one of the strangest - at least from today's vantage point. But in just a few years, Greenland could become a flashpoint in world politics.

Also, why was this story flagged?
I wouldn't do that to them. They have a right to interview how they want. I just wasn't good enough. They were looking for someone who could think on their feet under pressure in the moment and I'm not that guy.

I need a quiet place to sit and think something through and plan it out. It is why I did well on the test portion but not on site surrounded by interrogators. In those kind of situations I kind of feel like I'm the in the movie Swordfish where they're like, "Hack that server you have sixty seconds! (gun to head)" The difference is, I would have been dead.
Yes, but supply and demand still doesn't permit your wage to outstrip your value.

No reason to get a CEO at the margin if they are not valuable (even if CEOs are in very short supply)
If you don't know how to do it because you don't know Rust, then fine, that's reasonable. (Albeit a strange criticism to lodge from my perspective.)

Otherwise, I would "assume" that you need to use libc bindings over ffi to use whatever udp APIs you would normally use from C. This is how Rust's standard library implements the higher level udp APIs for example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/net/struct.UdpSocket.html

But I used a question mark also because this is not something I've done before, so I can't share an example. I wasn't being adversarial. Even my suggestion above could be wrong. That is, I don't understand the essential difficulty here. Perhaps someone else can chime in.
Yes - my best interview was with an online flower shop. We walked though building a "like" widget that other sites could embed - from the front end architecture, to middle layer to database choices. It was exactly like something you'd expect a lead engineer/architect to design.
It is actually a sign that something is very wrong with the general economy.

Negative rates only happens when investors shy away from stocks and just want their money to be safe for the next 5-10 years. Investors are actually willing to pay just to have their money kept safely out of the stock market. What does that tell you?

There is so much volatility (read: Trump). Stocks can both go up and down with a tweet. Until the next day or 4 hours later. So investors flees stocks and look for safe bonds.
Fun fact: Matthew Prince had to borrow money from his mother when Cloudflare was just starting out.

They've come a long way.

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1129929178382446592
The free multimeter from Harbor Freight is like that. One of the leads snapped off internally the first time I used it. I opened it up and it was held against pressure using a plastic weld which had failed immediately.
Why would I pick a company to short, and then pay someone to bad mouth that company?

Seems like a lot less risk to pay analysts to find possible frauds, and then short them while disclosing what they found.

The Netflix series "Dirty Money" introduced me to this concept, episode 3 "Drug Short" covers the analysts who called out Valeant Pharmaceuticals and took a pay day for their hard work through shorting the stock. Really I found it inspirational :)
I agree; in NYC, it's not uncommon for a software engineer to make $50+/hour; if you value your time at that rate, that means that some of these take home tests are effectively costing you $250-$500, when there's no guarantee that it will even result in a job.

What also frustrates me the most is when they say "use whatever language you want", I use Scheme or Haskell, and I get feedback to make it more "modular" by making it more object-oriented. The reviewers of the take-home assignment will be too afraid to admit that they don't understand Haskell, too afraid to admit that they made a mistake making the language a wildcard, and automatically assume that it's less scalable because it's not Java.
Be/CCS could realistically reduce CO2 to preindustrial levels (280-300 ppm) for about the cost of the needless war adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, therefore it's affordable.
The Pint-Size Nation Off the English Coast
Also - the results were atleast an order of magnitude more relevant.
The study I linked addresses that point - they suggest that "only 0–3% of the carbon from wood are ever emitted as landfill gas after several decades". I don't consider myself qualified to evaluate that claim, but it certainly seems plausible, given that wood clearly decays far slower than, for example, kitchen scraps found in household bio-waste.
I sure as heck put a lot more weight on his clever approach and execution in gathering data on a problem he discovered _on his own_ than I do on what header (??) he used on LinkedIn.
They disproportionately go to people that pay taxes. One could argue taxes disproportionately affect people that make more because they pay higher marginal rates.

A person making $200k pays a higher percentage than someone making $50k. So by definition, those making more are disproportionately affected by taxes. The government keeps more of every dollar earned from someone making more money. Not sure how that is fair. If we want fairness, everyone pays an identical rate. Making more money doesn’t mean I use more dramatically more government, so why should I pay a higher rate than people who make less? A flat tax is fair and doesn’t punish success (or failure.)
This seems a bit like the online equivalent of stories auctioning off display space at high-visibility positions in their stores.
This is arguably true for any store, it's just that Amazon mostly has done it better. Every single store on earth will disappoint you at one time or another.
If you read the article you would know he's currently visiting Reno, NV and is voluntarily going
A new state comes with new federal representatives and senators. With control of congress balancing on a knife's edge, that makes statehood a huge political football. One side or another will see an advantage in it, and the other side will oppose it in force ... regardless of any other potential benefits.
Haha thanks for finding links! Was on a bus on my phone, so didn't have the patience...
I've worked on pretty cool projects since then at other companies. And, it isn't the only interview I've ever had like that, it is more common than I would like. It is sometimes very hard for me to prove myself. Even though I've had plenty of jobs in the past with proof I can code and with good references. I sometimes feel like I'm an imposter, even while kicking ass on a project.
Ok.

I just remember seeing a bunch of press releases of how Yahoo would be folded into the group led by the former AOL CEO, and that that group also contained TechCrunch and HuffPo. It felt weird that just those two were often mentioned together with AOL, and the initials lining up...?
> A spun-off Android would presumably support the same feature set for Google Search and say, Ecosia, alike.

This is already the case. Unlike with iOS, Google's apps do not have access to any more APIs than other developers' apps. One could argue that the APIs themselves are prioritized and developed according to the needs of Google's apps far more than the needs of other developers' apps, which I agree is potentially problematic, but without a particular consumer-harming example, it would be impossible to build an antitrust case on that. For example, I might like it if Amazon's App Store could have automatic app upgrade permission on my non-Amazon devices (requiring some API changes in Android to make this secure for app stores not installed on the system partition), but Amazon would have a tough time demonstrating enough consumer harm for the government to take action.
> Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it

I personally believe this is influenced by media consumption. I think “Everything is terrible” or “horrible thing happened” headlines are much more likely to get clicks than “world continues to gradually improve” headlines. Combine that with how consistently marketable outrage seems to be to just about everybody, and you end up with a world full of signals that everything is bad.
Well that article is really from a different time.

> The wife is the one who serves. But she is also the one who rules. It’s weird, because you have to stay humble and be strong all at the same time. The husband? He serves, too, only in a different way. And he protects. Just like the LAPD.

Even the reference to the LAPD in what seems to be a (positive?) light
You can feel pessimistic all you want, but the fact is that the framework of this government allows the population to cause change and punishes those who try to go around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair#Aft...
It's all linked as a single module. Just because they call one subcomponent of that "the kernel", doesn't mean the whole thing isn't the OS kernel, as the general definition means.

Linux also implements most features as separate modules that are linked together, that doesn't mean they aren't all part of the kernel.
That is certainly the case for law, consulting, and finance. And it has been like that for decades.

For the most part, I think it's due to two things:

- Signaling to clients ("We're hiring the best students from the best schools")
- The workload that these people are expected to tackle.

If you hire a 3.5 GPA student from good schools, with a impressive resume, there's a good chance that he/she is

- Smart. Not necessarily a genius, but smart enough to tackle most problems they get. Some fields, like consulting, require relatively fast thinking and soaking up new information / knowledge.

- Hard-working / good work ethics. They probably put in a lot of hours during their school years, which also happens to be something you'll meet in those industries

- Structured. People that go to the top schools don't tend to just stumble into them, there's a good chance they've planned and stuck to it.

And if you're a bit cynical, and it could also maybe signal:

- That they're from the "correct" socio-economic class. The majority of HYPS students come from well-off families. When the majority of your clients have similar backgrounds (upper middle-class to upper class), the social interaction can be a bit smoother.

But with that said, these companies have become more open and lenient on these kinds of things. They see that top students from "lesser" ranked schools are just as good as their peers from the Ivies.

Other fields, like tech, is a serious competitor for top talent. 30-40 years ago Ivy league grads flocked to management consulting and investment banking; And they still do, but top tech companies are attracting them too.
Additionally, the required storage volume looks pretty insane (see one of the figures in the linked paper).

I'm not convinced of biomass burial.
“toxic” still tops the charts too