skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As if they all WANT to be lied at...

well... I mean, that's the whole point - end game is to have engineer-sourced figures that you can show to your banker so that they put cash in your account and become subject to the opportunity cost paradox when it's too late and you have to move your deadlines.
You have the four knobs to turn. Resources ($, FTE), scope, deadline, quality. The dilemma typically is that the one calling the shots wants to fix three of them and does not accept the fourth knob has to be turned. Another is that close to a deadline the resources knob doesn't matter anymore unless the deadline knob is turned. And when the deadline knob is turned it makes the scope knob feeling very attractive suddenly to the same kind of people.

In such situations having people skills helps. You can say no in many ways but you have to try and understand their problems as well. That big conference, competitors having announced something recently, you name it.
1. I hope Surface from Microsoft will succeed. For those that live through the real IE era, i.e you are 35+ or 40s, I cant believe I am recommanding Microsoft.

2. I hope Apple fails, it seems obvious Tim Cook is lacking the awful tasing medicine Steve Jobs once had.

Unfortunately it wont happen. iOS developers will need a Mac anyway, and along with those Professionals that uses MacBook, the MacBook will continue to do well and Apple will look at the sales Data and say everything is fine. ( Apple's definition of Professional is very Narrow, and programmers dont fit into that category )

We are close to 5 years mark since the butterfly Keyboard was fist introduced on MacBook in early 2015.
> Also, one cost of running "laboratories of democracy" is that some of them fail, and some of them are run incompetently or corruptly or cruelly.

That is true of nation states as well, and yet we trust them with sovereignty.

In our Union, states have to abide by a baseline set of rules per the Federal Constitution (free speech, right to a fair trial, equal protection before the law, etc). US States aren’t run by Kings and Queens, they’re democracies with checks and balances, state Constitutions, judiciaries, legislatures, and executive agencies.

Insofar as a state would be run corruptly or cruelly, it would be the will of the people of those states.
That Marx did not adequately foresee the future and that his ideology did not prevent its perversion by unscrupulous, power-hungry individuals are both valid critiques and are two of the reasons I don't support Marxism myself.

That's different from saying that what Marx envisioned as a utopia (or even the path to get to utopia) was what the Soviet Union became. He did not foresee that nightmare and he did not want that nightmare, and I genuinely believe that most Marxists don't either. They are, if anything, a bit too well meaning and naive, and think that everything will turn out for the best once the proletariat gain control over the means of production.

I'm not sure I agree with you about human nature, but I do think an army of unscrupulous people stand ready and willing to subvert that sort of system and to use true believers to further their own welfare rather than the welfare of society as a whole.

True believers willing to kill others to build their utopia appear all throughout history, not just in ostensibly Marxist or Communist societies, but in the Inquisition, the Crusades, Nazi Germany, and many other horrific places and times, and they never end well (even if you think some ideal ends justify such bloody means).

If a true utopia is ever to arise (if that's even possible), it has to do so and be sustained through non-violent means.
> Uh... the headline of the article was literally "Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand".

Which part of that statement isn't true?

You read that headline one way. Myself another. When someone actually reads the article (a lost art now) you get full context in case there was any confusion.

I'd argue that calling OpenAI misleading (in this instance) is even more misleading. From Marcus's Tweet I assumed that he had problems with OpenAI's actual claims. Nope. He just didn't like the headline.
Por qué no los dos?
looking at the roadmap it seems like a number of things are coming...

https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
Giving someone a house that can't even feed themselves won't fix the problem.

I am not for a Housing First model. I'm for increasing the availability of market based housing that makes sense for small households (1-3 people) who may not have/want a car.

Most drug addicts aren't wealthy.

Drugs cost money. Taking enough drugs to qualify for a label of addict isn't cheap. Some drug addicts manage the high cost of addiction by becoming dealers.

But the addicts and alcoholics I've personally known were pretty comfortably well off. Seriously poor people with very low incomes simply can't afford to stay drunk or high. They don't have enough money to buy that much booze or drugs on a consistent basis.

There are tons of shelters in and around the city (and most big cities), but most won't go because they won't be able to get drunk or high.

I neither drink nor do drugs. I was homeless for nearly six years. I never stayed in a homeless shelter because they are often basically a cross between a prison and a shit hole.

They have mold problems, theft problems, highly constraining rules that middle class would not accept to get housing themselves (such as curfews), etc.

Yes, cities like San Francisco that are trying to not be monstrously uncompassionate and trying to avoid the evils of criminalizing poverty are all too often doing things that don't actually resolve the issue and tend to help entrench it.

I'm the author of the piece under discussion. Before I was homeless, I was studying to become an urban planner.

I've researched this problem space for at least two decades. I'm trying to come up with actual solutions that can help make a real difference.

Some of the things I would like to see:

1. More SROs and Missing Middle housing.

2. More walkable and bike-friendly communities and better public transit so cars stop being a necessity in the US and lack of a car stops being a huge barrier to having a middle class life at all.

3. More flexible employment for people who don't fit in to "regular jobs" and better programs for helping such "misfits" find employment that makes sense for them.

4. A real solution to America's health care issues which are a huge financial burden for far too many people and a factor that helps push some people out into the street.
This is why real freedom is financial freedom.

You don't like what's going on at work, find another job.
Financial Independence/Retire Early.
One forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/
But that race to the bottom.. Are your eyes as a company. You see improvement potential, you know when a method has reached its peak and innovation is necessary for a leap. Anyone can do that iterative grind towards perfection ?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it genuinely worked to begin with, but the numbers were lower than they expected so then they just made it random.
Has anyone used IBM's Plex Mono[1] for an extended period of time? If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[1] https://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono
filed under: no shit!!

how does anyone think this is journalism. all you need is a pulse and an IQ above freezing temp to know that FB is a cesspool.
What's wrong with Math.random()? I use it all the time (graphics) and it works like a charm.
> Sure, but the normal working class hero have limited capital

Everyone has limited capital. You get it to grow by buying stock and participating in the ownership class. Poor people instead tend to buy lottery tickets, which have a negative return on capital, meaning lottery tickets are a route to poverty. Stocks have a positive return. (On average, of course.)

> and limited time to research and limited knowledge of the stock market.

There's never been more information about stock investing that's for free and just a click away.

> Sure, he can own 0.00002% of a company, but in the end it doesn't really matter. He still doesn't have control over the means of production of which he puts his own labor into.

He gets paid for his labor, which he can use to buy ownership stock.

> He's still dependent on his salary

Buying stock with one's salary is a route to financial independence.

> which the true owner of the means of production can take away at any time.

You are a true owner if you own stock.
I really hope you're joking. It scares me that distracting entertainment is preferred over advancement in reality. Remembering (true or not?) that we spent more on movies about extinction level impacts than on actual detection and prevention.

That said, I enjoy watching Expanse and look forward to s4 :)
They don't completely solve the problem, but it would be much harder to evacuate the cities without the highway system in place.
The solution to politicians being deceitful is to let politicians decide what is the truth?
I think they're just called 'Kraft Singles' - they aren't cheese, even by American definitions!
I'm having flashbacks to my honeymoon.
TIBET(tm) 5.0 Video Introduction
Can't assume they don't have integrity. They might just have different moral values.

I would gladly implement this any day. Its not illegal.
The ones I’ve seen look pretty appealing but don’t think I could bring myself to purchase something from such a disreputable company
No laws I’m aware of in the US carve out any exceptions for private homes. Even if you’re in a one-party consent state, if you leave the room and no one else in the room has consented you could be looking at a felony.
I'm confused. It should be easy to demonstrate the benefit, if there is one. Just show them the bugs!

For me, it's not "status anxiety". It's simply not worth the effort.

The last couple static analysis tools I ran on my programs, I spent a while getting the tool to not-crash (because even though the authors obviously had a static analysis tool themselves, they either didn't bother to run it on their own code, or it wasn't good enough to find actual issues). These tools flagged only a couple issues, and almost all of them were places where it couldn't really cause any problems, but the type system was not strong enough for me to prove why it couldn't go bad. So I spent a while sorting through false-positives.

I'm not going to spend hours with a tool to find only a couple (real) bugs, which no user has ever reported seeing, and which I've gotten no automated crash reports about. I have much better uses for my time.
This is yet another example of the divide between wizarding and engineering[1]. When you're a small startup, what matters is the expressiveness of your language, and the ability do do a lot of things very very quickly. Type safety, performance, readability, those things don't matter. You're just a bunch of engineers who know the whole codebase inside out, you're pretty certain of what you're doing. In short, you're wizarding. If you grow big enough, this approach slows you down greatly, and you need to switch to engineering. You sacrifice some speed for making the codebase more understandable to a larger group of people, you can no longer assume everyone knows all the code, you write unit tests, need types and dislike metaprogramming because of the confusion it creates. This is why languages like Python, Ruby, Lisp or Smalltalk are amazing for small startups, but Java is what enterprises use. They're different ends of the wizarding/engineering spectrum. I wish there was a language that let you move gradually from one end to the other, exactly when you need to.

[1] https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs-engineering...
The Tyranny of Choice
Interesting. Now I"m wondering how to motivate someone to use both of them. Maybe two different kinds of food, specific to each snake?
Cars and trucks emit more than just CO2. They also emit particulates, nitrogen oxides, and sulphur oxides in the case of diesel. Getting thousands to millions of vehicles off the road is going to dramatically reduce local pollution in addition to cutting down on CO2.

Los Angeles is infamous for being a city with a lot of air pollution (particularly smog) and so cutting down on cars commuting to/from LA should be a major priority for environmentalists.
Applying ethical standards to chimps seems weird. By what measure did they become more ethical?
agree on the trade-offs

have you given pop_os a try for the hdpi/multimonitor issue?
I've been tempted to, but managed to convince myself that was irrational.
Feels relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

Basically OP, but amped up and told kind of like a ghost story.
I've more than once gone from knowing nothing about a language + ecosystem to releasing something comparable in quality to the norm for the platform, in three to six months.

It's mostly about knowing what you ought to be able to do. "Where's the hello world example? Let's get that deploying so we get in a good feedback loop. This is a GUI system that's not the Web, so probably there'll be event hooks or callbacks or something, I'll go look at how I respond to a click event and that should give me a good idea. And probably I'll draw with method calls of some kind and want to organize my code in such-and-such way as a result to keep the drawing code together, but maybe they have an XML design language or some other junk, I'll go check". Stuff like that.

Or "this is a web-focused backend framework so I need to figure out the idiomatic way to interact with storage systems like databases, how & where it's best to set headers, should see if it's got some standard way to manage migrations, et c."

You know what you need to do, the right way's a Google or glance at the docs away, and a lot of it's a once-per-project thing or something that can be quickly hidden behind a simple function call or just copy-pasted as necessary and appropriate. The rest is just refs/pointers, loops, objects, recursion. Normal shit everything has.

The hard part is usually the build & packaging system, in my experience, because those are usually terrible and are usually where the big hair-pulling multi-hour-losing unproductive speed-bumps show up. Big & popular doesn't make it any more likely to be much better or easier to figure out "best practices", as described in hip blog posts versus reality (see: Javascript).
Engagement is more important than eyeballs, since the more engagements you have, the more eyeballs you'll reach.
I've wondered if the stained mouths of the Mentats in Dune was inspired by betel nuts. They're a common chewed stimulant throughout Eastern Asia and have a tendency to stain the mouth red.

Not sure what inspired the glowing eyes of spice users though...
I assume this author prefers techcrunch's megaphone to facebook's because TC has an editorial tone and picks their experts. But wading through a crowd to get your information is the new normal. The era of edited information is over. There are pros and cons but this genie isn't going back in its bottle.
My bad. It reality it has the MIL-STD-810G cert. Sorry for causing confusion.
I like that these things are being revealed and I previously read stories that these techniques were getting less effective since more people are aware of them. That's at least half the battle. Legal punishment of this behavior is not something I think I would support since I would be worried about it being impossible or at least very hard to enforce properly.
> Tap-water is kept in nice dark pipes.

It doesn't normally stay there long enough to get stagnant.
It's a true statement, though. They decided to move away from the safety conscious approach they had taken in the past.
It is a sad story, but from reading it, I dont think they manipulated him into going overseas. If you just look factually at the statements of the FBI, not the implications, it sounds like they asked him not to go, but he went anyway. Seems like the responsibility is not the FBI's, he's 28, old enough to take responsibility for his own decisions.

There's even some implication that they intervened and shut down his other trip (to meet a woman he wanted to marry in ISIS territory! Bad Idea!). So FBI knew about the Russia trip but didn't shut it down maybe because he wasn't an employee they control? It's a free country, you dont need an exit visa. And asking him for contact info doesn't necessarily imply that they asked him to go. The article danced around that question, implying that FBI asked him to go (because they knew he went), but it's hard to imagine the FBI thinking the guy was a competent field agent (after shutting down the jihadi-bride trip). What would anyone have to gain from him bumbling around Donetsk/Russia? He was adept at penetrating jihadi chat groups, why would they risk that asset?

It seems that (from what little we have to go on) the agent handling him was far more concentrated on the middle east, but asked him to do a one-off on Donetsk, and he got interested in that region on his own.

Also it says that FSB invited him over. That was the big red flag for me: "Hey Mom! guess what?! FSB invited me to Russia!! w00t!" What happened to that paper? What did it say exactly?? Why would you tell your mom that FSB invited you to Russia?

Something's not quite right in this narrative, so many holes.

WSJ is doing FBI FUD pieces now?
You shouldn't be able to call yourself an engineer unless you have a BEng, personally. Some places actually have laws against calling yourself an engineer without one.
An important questions to ask is: for each visible element on the page, whose speech is it? The stuff inside the boxes is the speech of the users. Everything outside, including the order and choice of the posts, is Facebook's speech.

This is even more obvious with YouTube. The choice of who they recommend is Google's. Which means it's reasonable to ask them why they're recommending fascist and antivax propaganda.
I wish some of the engineers that dropped out over this could speak up.
Boeing didn’t create the MCAS system because they thought it was a superior design or a labor saving mechanism. They did it to compensate for bad design of the physical plane.
Just switched to a Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 which is almost the same machine as a X1 Extreme Gen 2. You can get upto 64 GB of user-upgradeable RAM and 2 replaceable SSDs in a package approx the same weight but 1-2 mm thicker than a 15 inch Macbook Pro. It may not fit the current fashion but to me it's a really aesthetically attractive package.

Windows 10 Pro with WSL is MUCH better than I expected it to be. Download Conemu, Terminus or similar as a terminal and you may as well be running Linux. Download VxXsrcv and you can even run the Linux version of your IDE. I run the Linux versions Emacs, IntelliJ and Pycharm, not the Windows versions.

Hardware wise, the Trackpad is worse but I don't really miss it. Keyboard is much better. Lots of ports. Great screen, though most of my time is spent connected to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. Multi-monitor support is good. Only annoyance is that if the screens sleep all your applications get moved to whatever monitor you set as primary but this is a minor annoyance.

Ubuntu runs great but since I can ssh to multiple machines running Linux already, and I can run WSL, I really don't feel the need for Linux on the machine itself.

Less thermal throttling. Battery life is decent. I get a real 8 hours in battery save mode even with IntelliJ or Pycharm running, so long as I've set things up in the IDE to save battery by not continuously re-indexing things. Most Thinkpads are rated Milspec 1 so the keyboard isn't going to die with the first spec of dust and the machine will survive minor mistreatment. Windows with WSL basically gives me everything I need.

I bought a Macbook the week Apple released OSX and have been an Apple fanboy for years but at this point for what I do, as someone doing a fair bit of programming, it's an inferior machine.

I've also tried the various Dell XPS machines. They frankly aren't really comparable to Thinkpads in how well they are built or fit and finish. The XPS 15 is a direct competitor to the P1 Gen2 (or X1 Extreme) and in my opinion if you use both for a week, there is no comparison. I have friends who have also switched to Thinkpads and/or Dell XPS machines so I was able to compare directly before I bought them.
This was true for a long time, but we do actually have a bootstrapped openjdk for arm since a few months: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/65247
I was always under the impression free speech advocacy is the spirit of unlimited speech and not the literal word of law in speech. For example, I recall lots of controversy that is the deplatforming of various alt-right advocates and speakers (Sargon of Akkad for example, or 8chan, or the banning of various subreddits). And while it is literally legal for a private entity to no longer want to service parties it doesn’t find tasteful, the actual act of doing it I’ve seen violates the ‘spirit’ of free speech. I believe that phenomenon is the one being referenced.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of coffee that thoughts acquire speed. The teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning.
Not quite as poisonous as other places. And some people actually post nice stuff.

It’s what you make of it and harder to go to shit.
“We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume”

A bit of history of that joke: https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/we_...

> 6 February 1833, New York (NY) Evening Post, pg. 2, col. 2:

> Among the business anomalies which meet the eye of a stranger visiting New-York, are the placards exhibited in the windows of the retail shops, informing passers by that the stock in trade within is selling off at prime cost, or according to the more alluring announcement which some have adopted, at fifty per cent. less than cost. A person attracted by this lure to become a purchaser, must soon come to the conclusion that either the veracity of the dealer is not of the most scrupulous description, or else that he laid in his goods at enormous prices. One in the habit of passing these shops, must at least smile to perceive that notwithstanding their owners have been selling off their goods “at less than cost” for so long a time, their shelves continue to be as well filled as ever. We have heard of one individual, who “wishing to retire in consequence of declining health,” was five years disposing of his merchandise, “at prime cost,” and at the end of this time he found his capital so much augmented that he removed into a more busy part of the city, and entered into trade on a much larger scale than before. How is it that trades-people can sell their goods at less than they paid for them, and yet realize a handsome profit, is one of those mysteries of commerce which we never could penetrate. Perhaps they are like the Irish mercer, who, having assured a lady customer that the silk he desired to dispose of to her actually cost him more per yard than he charged for it, was asked how he then could afford to sell it so low. “Ah, madam, he replied, we depend for our profit on selling a large quantity.”
What you call Wizarding I call "ordinary Software Development". A software developer spends ~70% of their time writing features and the rest mixed between organization/planning/roadmapping etc. A software engineer spends ~30% of their time writing features and the rest of it managing technical debt and making long-term investments towards better features and processes.

Too many companies need devs but have engineers, or they need engineers but only have devs :/