skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
V looks like a promising language. You know you have made it when there is an "awesome v" page on github. One question, why is the original `v` much smaller than the `v` compiles using itself?

$ size v
text data bss dec hex filename
445817 1032 688 447537 6d431 v

$ ./v -o v2 v.v && size v2
text data bss dec hex filename
651086 51000 1000 703086 aba6e v2
When I read this article it struck me as a blatant PR battle between FairTest.org and test vendors. This article ended up providing a more nuanced view:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/coll...
The entire practise of Buddhism requires free will.

Without free will, it would be impossible to follow the eightfold path.

You may be thinking that karma predetermines all our behaviour. This is a false view that the Buddha specifically denied.

Our current state, and our current actions are determined by a combination of past conditioning (karma) and our will/intentions in the current moment.

You could think of it as a function with two main input streams.

Because it's recursive (past will/intentions feeds back in as karma) it makes the trajectory nonlinear, which is why it's such a difficult path to navigate.
Nitpick: it's C2H4, ethene. CH4 is methane. You can power rockets with that, but not ripen bananas.
To claim Edison's best invention is a cross-disciplinary invention collaborative and that we need more of that today...what would the author think of maker spaces, of the numerous interdisciplinary departments and majors out there? Hackathons too? They're all the same spirit, though admittedly they look a lot more like a tech giant than Edison's quaint campus.

To my mind, Edison picked many low hanging, simple fruits, and the inventions that remain to us in the 21st century are simply far too complicated to churn out by the 1000 patents. Could anyone today have 1000 patents to their name, nevermind a dozen legitimately world changing ones?
We could solve it overnight if every government agreed to tax single use plastic production and sale then use the funds to pay for recycling. Organizations like The Plastic Bank pay people in communities of high polluting regions to recycle plastic preventing it from entering waterways. It can be solved in many ways but sadly getting every country to agree on something like that is difficult.
Biology is driven by complex but precisely known rules (from molecular dynamics down to quark-gluon interactions). That doesn't mean we know how biology works , not even for a single person, because it's complex. Psychology attempts to do something much harder, understand the behavior of entire populations of nervous systems. Both are complex, but in principle not uncomputable.

And there's a definition of free will: that actions of humans axiomatically cannot be precomputed.
Why Does Inflammation Seem to Underlie All Sickness?
If you were in a position of power like politicians, had mates who you wanted to make wealthy there's no better way than to implement a impossible porn filter. Think of how much public money they spent. I wonder what company lied and stood up and took the money to say they would do it. ? Anyone who's tech savvy would tell you it's pointless.
The more we learn about this guy the more I can’t wait for him to ride the wave into obscurity and irrelevance except for in the immortal pages of case studies of what not to do.
If you believe nihilism necessarily follows from anarchy or atheism, I'm assume you were never actually paying attention to the philosophy of either.
In my musical training I was taught that musicians figured it out in the west by trial error. Bach then wrote the Well Tempered Klavier to demonstrate pieces in all 12 major and 12 minor keys, in 1722.

There is a reference here however to a chinese mathematician who worked it out in 1584. I don't know if his work made it across the continent and influenced anyone. It is not likely that many musicians would have understood the math in the 16th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament#targetText=Or....
In some countries, the food delivery apps and companies aren't actually dead yet. Grab, Lineman, Lalafood, Get and FoodPanda to name a few.
ML From Scratch, Part 1: Linear Regression
There’s nothing wrong with setting up company structures that have radically different rights wrt. Shares; what is important is that the market prices them correctly. And the market clearly has no idea how to price the control. Look at Facebook or many of the other major tech exits that have allowed ords to be priced from a ‘control’ perspective.

The market believes in a BDFL model at the moment and is being taught a bit of a lesson
> Many universities have decided that they value diversity (ever how they define that) higher than or equal to pure academic results.

This is a rational thing to do, because "pure academic results" are hard to get a useful measure from.

Here's an analogy. Suppose you are looking for the most secure encryption algorithm. One thing you could measure is the number of unbroken messages generated from the algorithm. This seems to make sense, because good algorithms will be broken less easily than bad ones. But a bit of thinking will demonstrate this is a bad idea. There are a ton of DES messages in the world, most of which nobody has bothered to break. So by sheer numbers we would conclude DES is more secure than AES, and both are much more secure than any brand née algorithm. Since this is untrue, our heuristic must be wrong. Meanwhile, another heuristic of giving intentional and honest consideration to new, unproven algorithms seems likely to work better.

In the same way, if you want to select for academic potential or * aptitude, measuring prior academic results* may not be the highest-value signal.
Are there any more past or present challenges like these?
It is. You’ve applied a function to a value, and that function needs to be evaluated for every row in the set. One way to deal with cases where you need to replace Nulls, or to do any other kind of polishing, is to return the raw data into a temp table and then do an update on that temp table, replacing all nulls with your chosen value using WHERE x IS NULL. This minimizes the time you hold any locks on your live tables. And now you can index the hell out of your “staging” table and use that as your driver for additional joins etc.
What Introverts Can Teach Us About Being Alone
Calliope Mini: Board from 3rd Grade Onwards
> I think all the 'Uber-for-X'/food delivery apps that popped up circa 2015 and went under a couple years later were actually the pets.com equivalents.

Surely ‘Oh shit, point to point delivery for small items in a large built up urban area is actually really difficult and expensive’ is the Webvan equivalent?
Immortal page of "how to ride an unicorn to death"
Music theory is a cultural artifact encompassing centuries of development. It can be challenging to newcomers, but just like in complex software systems, there are often good reasons why things are the way they are.
oh that's fair, however, not having free will does not mean one does not have will at all. We re still motivated by our constitution as persons and animals, we will choose to despair or not, just that decision won't be ex nihilo. In a way it s rather comforting, like deciding to "sit back and enjoy the ride" .
Incredible Video!
You’re accusing Adam of making false assumptions, but have nothing to back your position. All of that aside, however, it doesn’t matter one bit whether babies need knee pads. What matters is whether the person with the money believes that their child is in pain. The intent of the slogan is to change perception, as was all of their marketing. Some products solve a real problem and others create and then solve an imaginary one. Again, how does this make him delusional?
In the UK they come in large boxes by ship unwrapped. They are green when they arrive. I’m sure japan can manage that.

I suspect it’s a social thing rather than a necessity.
In a society that seems to require a college degree for everything, that's probably the right answer. Find a way to give everyone a degree.
That's the problem, if you're actually on a volcano your bandwidth is no good.
Money laundering laws are like the war on drugs: they cause a huge amount of inconvenience to common people but completely fail at their objective.
>Music theory is a mess.

Why do you say so?
On my degree (chemical technology, Poland) it was very easy to get into (200 places with low cutoff score), but on the second year there was only 100 pupils. There is a general correlation between initial points (Polish standardised high school test) and future academic success, but if they were to admit 100 people, only about 65 would manage to go to the second year. Changing admission standards doesn't mean that they change graduation standards.
I wonder if W. Peter Iliff, the screenplay writer for Point Break, was aware of and inspired by this 1964 surfer-led heist.
Case in point the whole Bloomberg Apple Spy-Chip fiasco.
Turns out Bloomberg reporters are paid for moving markets...
Most tech growth companies have doubled or more since 2014. So Amazon being at $150B market cap back then probably still means they’d be around $300B+ today without AWS. I’d peg it at $350-375B minimum right now. Amazon’s mostly positive and beloved image to consumers (I know places like HN feel differently) would have still helped Amazon without AWS. In 2018, their operating income for North America was $7B+. International loss was $2B+. So they still did $5B in operating income. AWS adds in another $7B+ of course which is huge.

I’m not saying AWS is worth Amazon’s current market cap minus $375B. Could have both segments being valued less by the market as one combined company. It’s just I have a hard time seeing Amazon worth around $150B in late 2014, which def includes some of AWS pre-publicly being reported in earnings, not being worth around triple that amt now with the way stocks have gone. Assuming AWS was valued at $20 in 2014.

For the growth, their retail growth has slowed. Under 20% a year now. But their growth in subscription (Prime mostly) and advertising are still growing at above 1/3. Like AWS. So the company wouldn’t have nothing for the stock to be speculatively high on without AWS.
This is a pretty weird thing, and not inconsistent with simple payback for Iceland telling creditors (mostly in the UK) to get stuffed back in 2008. Apparently they've recently plugged back into the international system, who are hopping mad they can't shut down Icelandic NGOs if they're involved in .... non proliferation or terrorism activities. Maybe some North Korean business nobody is talking about?

https://grapevine.is/news/2019/10/10/fatf-iceland-needs-to-d...

https://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/reports/mer4/...
Thanks for the answer

The idea was to get a list of interesting places to choose from, apply to a bunch of them and try to have as much information as possible for choosing the final one

Another interesting question would be which culture would be the best fit for me, I hadn't thought of that, thanks
How can I know if there is a "strong faculty in my area of interest"?

H-index on google scholar?
Surprisingly, what makes tones sound consonant is a matter of controversy in music perception research. The ratio between fundamental frequencies theory is most easily debunked: if that were true, equal temperament tuning would sound unbearable, but the over-tone matching theory is not confirmed either thus far.

In fact, here are two recent studies that suggest life-time exposure plays a significant role in the perception of consonance. If that's true your own judgement of consonance of two sounds is not a good evaluation of a theory of consonance, because that judgement may be shaped by your cultural exposure.

Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18635 pdf: http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/papers/McDermott_etal_2016_conso...

Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09609... (paywalled but sci-hub is your friend)
Perhaps "artisan", although in practice I don't think there is a single word. Instead, people tend to use the domain-specific term for whatever type of true craftsman they are referring to. "Welder" "Machinist" "Watchmaker" "Tailor" "Woodworker" etc.

Also as an aside, I think the whole "craft" term was co-opted by people who wanted to cash in on the perception of quality and care when really they just wanted better small business margins. It used to mean something more.
We can all help stop this. Everyone can reduce their contribution. I cut out nearly all packaged food, which reduced my garbage to where I empty it less than once a year (I last emptied my trash in September 2018) http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2. I was pleasantly surprised that doing so cost less, reduced food preparation time, increased diversity of food, and led to more social interaction with friends and farmers. It's more accessible for people in food deserts and without time. For the record, it took a couple years of practice to go from weekly garbage to monthly to yearly.

That's just one example. Everyone can reduce some. The more you start, instead of just accepting and throwing your hands up, the easier each next step.

The producers will see the trend and stop buying plastic.

Of course there are other ways to act: legislation, creating healthier alternatives.

The point is: everyone can act starting here and now and they will find joy in it. It may take time, but acting on one's values is rewarding.
The organisation of shares is really a matter for the shareholders and many of the well known dual share class companies seem to have done well for investors. BRK, Ford, Google, Facebook. Even Uber is still valued at $54bn which is not bad for a taxi app.
Well, he still made it out as a billionaire.
All of these worries churn, like any other fashion. Through a cycle of short attention span, and craving for novelty.

5-10 years ago in the grocery store line, myself and half the people in front of me were bringing our own reusable grocery bags. I feel guilty acknowledging this, but we all just seemed to... stop. Because it was a mild hassle, and the novelty wore off. I can't remember the last time I've seen someone with with their own bags, and I imagine that younger store clerks would be confused by them.

We're still concerned about plastic (that worry comes and goes like a pendulum). We just got bored and lost our attention span for one of the most direct things we can do to reduce plastic.

10-15 years ago, myself and most of my political peers were more upset about Guantanamo Bay than plastic or climate change. Nothing ever changed there, but I can't recall the last time I've heard it mentioned. The average anti-war protestor of the post-9/11 years probably understands little to nothing about U.S. action in Syria over the past decade.
A static analysis report of published codebases regarding metrics like line length per function would be interesting to see.

Guidelines should come with a rationale so that in the very least following them when it contravenes their intent can be justifiably avoided.

If I can't understand and appreciate the rationality behind a guideline and I'm not required by coding standards or tooling to follow it, I'm not going to.

Here's a guideline; don't surrender your common sense and let someone's generalized ideology dictate the design of your program.

While I see advantages to minimizing the length of functions, I can't imagine a well written program following this five line rule.

My concerns are that it increases the length of the source code which damages readability, that it scatters functionality and obscures control flow, and that it unnecessarily requires the formation of many interfaces.

The rule is far too general in it's application "all functions" and at the same time too specific "5" to be useful.

If you said instead "in general, try to make your functions do one thing well and divide and conquer the problems until each function is not very hard for you or someone else to understand",

Then OK.
> How would you expect investors to know that?

Something called due diligence.

Plus, this insanity is removing power from investors. If they are not even going to look at the company share structure, what kind of decision were they going to make?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/airbnbs-quarterly-loss-repor...

Airbnb is successful but is it sustainable? That’s the question we need to be asking of the Uber generation.
Honestly, it's kind of insulting to himself. If I had as many delusions of grandeur as he does, I'd assume I'd instill the company from birth with such unwavering great culture, that it'd never go astray even 300 years in the future.
In fairness, this is kind of how people expected great media dynasties (like the Bancrofts or Sulzbergers) to work. And this is also a bit weird, because while now the idea of publishers as having a critical democratic function—and being more than just profit-seekers—is well-established, fifty years ago they were also brash big businesses, a bit like tech companies now.

I guess my point is that “changing the world” vs “making a buck” seem to be weirdly in the eye of the beholder.

Neumann seems to have either believed or tried to convince others that WeWork had some sort of greater mission beyond merely short-term office space. I think it’s nuts, frankly, but this is the logical extreme of the more well-established phenomenon of trying to convince investors your food/cookie/pot-delivery website is a “tech company” to justify insane PE ratios.

I don’t know my point. Maybe there are just a lot of idiots out there. But is it the founder, the VC, or the customer who’s the idiot? Seems to generally depend upon timing.
I agree, the 100% part is an exaggeration. They say that some part of the plastic will go to CO2 and it can be later transformed to plastic, but this transformation needs a lot of energy and is expensive. They propose an alternative o store the CO2 in a safe place, that is also expensive.

With this type of creative accounting, you can have a gasoline truck with zero CO2 emissions, because you collect somehow the CO2 in a giant tank and then transform it back to fuel (with a big cost of money and energy).
I guess if you are going to have a benevolent dictator, check they really are benevolent.
did he? He's very levered against his stock.
Every class action settlement I've been a part of in here in the USA has ended up with a similar outcome. As far back as when my parents bought Kodak's instant film camera that got sued out of existence by Polaroid, my parents got a coupon for a discount on a specific model of camera they could never find at a store (this was way before the internet) and coupons for Kodak brand batteries.
> a good README is a summary of all four of his documentation types

Came here to say/reiterate this. A README is very flexible and can be any of the four types, the decision of which will depend on the contents of the repository and on what the README is trying to accomplish.
Same experience with SVG. Inkscape is terrible at generating files, Illustrator is only marginally better (haven't tried Sketch yet).

The same thing applies to code too. There's the principle of using frameworks wherever possible that especially novice programmers stick to without realizing how much harm it can do in the long run.

My personal record is reducing the main code base of an app about 20 times (!) by just removing unnecessary frameworks and replacing others with better ones. No, 20 times applies to the main code, excluding the frameworks. This is the same kind of digital pollution.

Digital stuff such as graphics files, source code, etc scale too easily unfortunately for all of us, developers and users. Every time I open someone else's big iOS project I find about 80% of 3rd party code linked for no good reason. Let alone some essential frameworks that themselves create pollution by pulling endless dependencies (Google being one of the top offenders from my experience).

This is not going to change unfortunately. Digital media is cheap, easy to scale, usually a bit too expensive to get right (i.e. to reduce pollution) and at the same time it's not always easy to see the drawbacks of pollution in the long run.
iPhone 4. And probably 5. I've only ever opened a couple of iPhone 4 and 4s, but they were definitely way more repair friendly than an S8 or a HTC One.

And does 1mm under 9mm even matter? Maybe if you're one of those who claim a 15 inch laptop will break your back lol
> infamously spent a fortune on branding and advertising without doing any market analysis

This actually sounds exactly like the current tech unicorn overvaluation party we find ourselves in.
Minecraft becomes a board game, and the results are faithful, fantastic
Or use something like Inkscape, but then remove all the extra stuff manually.

You can even color SVG with CSS, making it easy to integrate single color icons into color schemes:

https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/fill/

edit: sigh, I don't know if that's for suggesting to use Inkscape and then remove stuff manually, or for linking css-tricks... so I'll answer to both hypothetical criticisms:

1.) You can't make something like this, as simple as it is, purely by entering numbers into a text file: http://b.sandboxx.org/icons/autonomy.svg

2.) I couldn't find a better page on fill, MDN for example flat out pretends there is no such CSS property, redirecting to SVG: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/fill

But I know CSS has this property because I'm using it, and it's awesome. You obviously don't need it on a site that just has one color scheme, or if using either black or white outlines depending on background is good enough -- but if you want icons that scale and fit any color scheme, and want to avoid digital pollution, this is something you should be aware of.
At least it was private money that hopefully learnt their lesson. Think of it as karmic wealth redistribution. Unless the private money turned out to be pension funds in which case oh shit.
Celebrating by repairing a 10 year old fridge. Fuse blew out, its soldered to control panel, so just called customer support, got part number, shipped via Amazon Prime using reward points, tossed out the old, popped in the new and voila!

Still think the vendor should have comped a replacement due to obvious design flaw of non-removable fuses. Sort of defeats the entire purpose ;)
Even worth the buildings owned and the cash payments for the word ‘we’?
He looks set to walk away with $700m regardless. He deserves a chapter of his own in How To Sucker A VC.
"4 hours work week" mindset and a craftsman mindset are not at odds with each other.

If you can build a business that you can maintain in four hours a week while generating enough profit to pay the bills, why not?

That would free up a lot of time that you can then spend pursuing interests that are unlikely to ever pay the bills (mathematics, music, painting, creative writing, whatever).

If your business is a means to that end, are you still a hack or are you a craftsman?

This disdain for lifestyle businesses is absurd. It's both sad and gross that some people are unable to see that it's possible to have ambition that is not tied to making money. A lifestyle business can give you an experience similar to that of being independently wealthy.

It might be hard for some to imagine, but not everyone is an Elon Musk wannabe, there are people who see building a business as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I understand that he didn't address the scenario I propose, presumably because he can't even conceive of it, but I don't get the traveling the world criticism either.

I mean, I myself am very critical of the digital nomad lifestyle, but "Spending time on something that you find enjoyable is professional malpractice" is not among my list of criticisms.