skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alright now everybody, please, resist the urge to post the shitty copycat sites that are always posted after motherfuckingwebsite.com. You can do it!
But from 2010 to 2017 (the cited years) are the years of the ACA.

Was it a failure?
Baker Beach in SF is quite picturesque.
Ask HN: Why do grad schools make such a big deal of letters of recommendation?
It seems very unfair to those without the social capital. They don't even seem to consider an application as complete if you're missing even one.
Indeed. We currently have machines with ~ 50 qubits and we’d need likely 10s of millions of qubits.
> Performing arithmetic operations against money in floating point is the dangerous part, as error can accumulate beyond an atomic unit.

A good example of this is trying to compute the sales tax on $21.15 given a tax rate of 10%. The exact answer would be $2.115, which should round to $2.12.

IEEE 64-bit floating point gives 2.1149999999999998, which is hard to get to round to 2.12 without breaking a bunch of other cases.

Here are three functions that try to compute tax in cents given an amount and a rate, in ways that seem quite plausible:

def tax_f1(amt, rate):
tax = round(amt * rate,2)
return round(tax * 100)

def tax_f2(amt, rate):
return round(amt*rate*100)

def tax_f3(amt, rate):
return round(amt*rate*100+.5)

On these four problems:

1% of $21.50
3% of $21.50
6% of $21.50
10% of $21.15

the right answers are 22, 65, 129, and 212. Here are what those give:

tax_f1: 21 65 129 211
tax_f2: 22 64 129 211
tax_f3: 22 65 130 212

Note that none of the get all four right.

I did some exhaustive testing and determined that storing a money amount in floating point is fine. Just convert to integer cents for computation. Even though the floating point representation in dollars is not exact, it is always close enough that multiplying by 100 and rounding works.

Similar for tax rates. Storing in floating point is fine, but convert to an integer by multiplying by an appropriate power of 10 first. In all the jurisdictions I have to deal with, tax rate x 10000 will always be an integer so I use that.

Give amt and rate, where amt is the integer cents and rate is the underlying rate x 10000, this works to get the tax in cents:

def tax(amt, rate):
tax = (amt * rate + 5000)//10000
return tax

I'm not fully convinced that you cannot do all the calculations in floating point, but I am convinced that I can't figure it out.
Show HN: DuckDuckGo to Google Escape Hatch
I only want a description (that I can copy, print out, or whatever); not an interactive notebook.
Many CPUs support BCD, at least in a limited number of ways compared to their normal binary representation.

The 8086 (and its descendants, of course) supports BCD by having instructions to adjust the result after the basic add/sub/mul/div instructions, though only one byte at a time.

The 6502's add and subtract instructions would operate on, and output, BCD values if the special purpose "decimal" flag was set. Again only in 8-bit (two digit) chunks but that is to be expected as it was an 8-bit chip generally.
> Unicode is simply a 16-bit code - Some people are under the misconception that Unicode is simply a 16-bit code where each character takes 16 bits and therefore there are 65,536 possible characters. This is not, actually, correct. It is the single most common myth about Unicode, so if you thought that, don't feel bad.

Verity Stob has a great column

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/04/verity_stob_unicode...

where she says that it is wrong to call this a myth, since that was how it was originally designed. It is better characterized as being obsolete, rather than a myth.
I hope that your physician didn't use WebMD. There are significantly better resources that are heavily vetted whereas WebMD is for the lay person.
I’m going to smuggle in some hyperbole, but Ledger fundamentally changed the way I view software. Other than programming languages and excel, there’s not much other software I’ve used where the actual solution is consistently such a short gap from my desire for a solution to exist. Good software should make you feel more powerful every time you use it.

Ledger compelled me to see progressively structured but minimally verbose “plain text”, as an input, as a large advantage with regards to barrier to entry, provided you have excellent documentation, intelligent design that’s close to the domain at hand, and copious examples for that structure.

Power users can dive deep into the syntax at will, and evolve a simple file into a complex one at their own pace over time. Feature discovery is like discovering a language, which makes sense, because you’re discovering how the plain text you’re typing matches a parser, and how that parsed representation maps to higher level concepts.

Meanwhile, my nontechnical friends are totally capable of keeping a ledger, and reading the results with minimal assistance.

Learning software that’s been built this way is like learning a language; it’s a challenge that’s tackled in stages and allows you to progress at your own speed.
Well, Samsung is already a defence contractor, they make autonomous sentry guns for the DMZ
Yes, quantum computing is mostly linear algebra.
Simon Willisons Dogsheep is also a similar project: https://dogsheep.github.io/
What civil war?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Civil_War
It's something I don't like about what programmers tend to mean when they say plain text: Plain text isn't the same as ASCII. It isn't the same as Latin-1 or some other eight-bit encoding. UTF-8 is plain text. UTF-16 is plain text, too, but UTF-8 is better to use on the Internet.

My point is that you can go well beyond the Latin alphabet and still be in the world of plain text. You can have correct quotes, as opposed to the apostrophe-quotes typewriters saddled us with, and still be producing plain text. There's nothing inherently "fancy" about using the writing systems most of the people on Earth are fluent in, and, thanks to Unicode, there's many fewer compatibility problems.
Why the bloody hell would a firm selling this stuff commercially be so easy to track down and take down?

I can't imagine how people are so clueless.

I mean, is it like "Sure, we're doing iffy stuff, but it's all in good fun, so why would anyone ever bother us?"
All those people who worked at Microsoft in the 90's and 2000's now work for at hundreds of other companies throughout the industry. And a whole bunch of people who weren't even born in those times now work for Microsoft.

I don't think your opinion is objective at all. It's based on treating a collective as a single mind.
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Happy to introduce you to others in company as well if you're interested in roles in engineering, product, design, or sales!
Ask HN: Have you used a Sales-as-a-Service platform before?
Has anyone here used a sales-as-a-service company to give their SaaS business conversion a boost? If so, please tell us your story, your experience, successes, failures, opinions ect. Which companies are best geared for 1 person startups? Which companies are worth their price? Help acquaint me so I am somewhat informed as I shop. Thank you.
Curious if this has benefits over an ssh reverse port forward set up. It doesn't seem any simpler, but perhaps it does something better.
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Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities.

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Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your messages, let's launch your rockets. :-)
automated tests don't necessarily catch all errors
A timely post, as December is prime 'Bert' month.

If Bert & Ernie are only Sesame Street characters to you, please watch "It's a Wonderful Life" (carefully) this holiday season. I think that's where Sesame Street got the names.
> I'm a current medical resident, and I have absolutely used YouTube to fill in the gaps.

I pull up online sources pretty regularly in the back of an ambulance. Most often to look up the details of some more obscure medication or condition in the pt's medical history. Generally I try to do it out of eyeshot of the pt...
The problem that I see is not so much that the quality of videos on YouTube is lacking, it is that the quality of officially sanctioned videos is lacking. Or that the availability of officially sanctioned videos of high enough quality are not readily available to the masses.

> ..."The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution."

As I understand it; professionals compared the techniques used to the techniques as they are taught in classrooms and textbooks and found that the techniques used in the video would not have resulted in a passing grade in a classroom environment.

Assuming that is true then the root cause isn't low quality YT videos. That is a symptom of the problem that the learning materials provided in classroom environments are not providing enough educational value to students in the first place.

I'm not in the medical field, but I've watched the struggle and politics of people fighting through medical school. It is grueling. If it's anything like tech then maybe 65% of it will apply in the real world and 15% you won't ever need to use in the first place. It's also going to be loaded with advanced technical jargon and put an incredible cognitive stress on students to teach otherwise simple, menial tasks while stressing statistics and verbatim policy while completely losing the spirit of those statistics and policies.

So to fix the issue, researchers should be studying these YT videos to determine what makes them so informational and engaging.

With car or computer repair videos people familiar with the subject matter will skip the non-essential information, focusing cognitive resources on the parts they need to clarify most. Students can focus on their own deficiencies without having to waste energy on arbitrary and irrelevant information.
Really squishy.
Newspaper Adherence to Media Guidelines for the Deaths of Spade and Bourdain
Yes, you can use https://github.com/tannercollin/standardnotes-fs to edit your notes with vim.
when the fractions actually dont matter... its so painless just to just store everything in pennies rather than dollars (multiply everything by 100)
I wouldn't be surprised actually. I've done a lot of "home remedy" type stuff.

I know from first-hand experience that discussing it online is a space with a lot of pitfalls. It's difficult to gauge the level of background knowledge of your audience and challenging to provide enough warnings to make it safe and useful while not insulting anyone's intelligence when different people in the audience will have vastly different levels of background knowledge pertinent to the problem space.
1. Self driving cars do not change the laws of physics. I would not walk in front of a car (self driving or otherwise) if I didn't reasonably expect it to stop in time and driver response time is only a small part of that.

2. Self driving cars are likely programmed to honor pedestrian crossings(in my experience few drivers do). This would inspire me to actually use said pedestrian crossings, helping regulate pedestrian traffic.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1
And that roughly captures the spot where I was seeing doubles used.

Yes, they could have used fixed point. I am guessing that what happened is that someone who had thought way more deeply about this than I ever needed to (I worked on the accounting side, where, yep, we always used decimals) either determined that, where the modeling was concerned, floating point errors were not worth worrying about, or estimated that the expected cost to the company stemming from bugs due to to fixed point math being easier to goof up on would have been smaller than the expected cost to the company due to floating point error.
Our conscious self is alerted to a decision that the brain is already planning
Mira AI | Senior Frontend/Full-stack Engineer | San Francisco (Mission) | Full Time | $110k - $160k + equity | On-site | https://www.askmira.com

Mira is building the next-generation consumer search and discovery platform for the $500B global beauty industry. Using modern machine learning techniques, Mira provides a personalized and prescriptive end-to-end beauty browsing experience. Combining user insights, including computer vision-based analyses of facial attributes, along with the industry’s largest index of beauty content, including videos, influencers, reviews, articles and images, we provide a streamlined mobile and web interface to intelligently lead consumers from exploration to discovery to purchase.

Hiring senior frontend or full-stack engineers to help develop product and guide our development processes towards best practices.

Our stack:

- React.js and React Native (w/ Redux)

- Python (Flask)

- PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch

- Airflow

- AWS (Lambda)

Apply through AngelList here https://angel.co/company/askmira/jobs/272075-frontend-full-s...

or reach out to me directly with any questions at jessica@miraai.com :)
Why 'even some scientific applications'? Don't nearly all scientific applications use floats?
Appending !g to your search does the same with less overhead and no install.
Eh, it works in this case as a whimsical self-deprecating title. I would never call anyone else this term, but self-reference is alright IMO.
Information and Infrastructure Security Director - Security Architect and Red Team Lead. Builds security organizations.

Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: Yes

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Technologies: Linux, Windows, AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, Docker, Python, C#, C++, Nginx, Bash, SQL, Cisco, Arista, Juniper

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ross-snider-b927b846/

Email: ross.snider [at] gmail [dot] com
This is a tricky point, but I would say that D-Wave systems are quantum computers, however they rely on coherence, and not entanglement (coherence is necessary for entanglement, but you don't get entanglement automatically from coherence ), and thus do not have a universal set of quantum gates. D-wave systems thus can gain a quadratic advantage over classical systems, but will not see exponential speedups (likely need entanglement for this).
The full title is "Newspaper Adherence to Media Reporting Guidelines for the Suicide Deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain".
Yes, and from what I can see, the desire to conserve the status quo has little to do with political conservatism and everything to do with ordinary self-interest.

I don’t think you can really personally blame someone for wanting maintain the character of their neighborhood (and inflate the value of their home). It’s perfectly rational behavior. The problem is that the preferences of this relatively small cohort are overriding the social and economic health of the city as a whole. Ideally, a democratic majority would overrule these narrowly self-interested concerns and force more development, more homeless shelters, etc., but for whatever reason this doesn’t seem to be happening in SF.
Wait, do I read it correctly? A GUI library has its own appstore now? How? Why?
What You Mean When You Say You Have an Open API (Not OpenAPI)
I learned this lesson the hard way. But now I resort back to books and obscure sources for my stats training. It's slow and painful, specially when you're alone and there's nobody to answer questions about this weird aggregation function you're learning.
Simple is always better, the problem is that "simple" isn't the same for everyone because different people have different needs. Simple is often simplified into "one one size fits all," which often just ends up being limiting.
I switched to DDG a few years ago. I think what I found was that I started being more specific in my search terms. I think its because Google has a profile about me that it applies to my searches but DDG doesn't know as much about me.

So for example, I might search for a class name and Googole will know what language / environment I'm working it, but I'll need to tell that to DDG when searching.
Sure, we'll see, but in the meantime I likely won't take the risk.
So much so that there appears to be persistent belief that the word "salary" is derived from "sel" (salt): http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht... .
Correct Authinfo used for storing encrypted password in config (instead of plaintext). No OAuth in my setup (also not using Gmail).

ps. You may want to look at the GMail/SMTP parts of this post https://github.com/redguardtoo/mastering-emacs-in-one-year-g...
Forget about Apple for a second, they will sell whatever to anyone, for sure.

But please focus on Google, which is the one putting the money!

Why Google pays so much money if they already have the best product and what the users want? Are they just giving B10$ as charity?

There are many reasons for doing that, but none of them is aligned with the make-believe statement that "build a better product and people will come"

I would agree that is a necessary condition, but by no means sufficient, which is kind of sad.
People Are Aware of Public APIs but Less Aware of Mobile APIs
Handling quantities with varying Unit of Measures is made quite a bit easier by using numerator and denominator pairs.
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Check out our careers page here: https://dutchie.com/careers
I'm a medical student in the States. Everything you said is spot on. Most of the time the presentation is straight forward and treatment fairly unremarkable. It's when nuances are introduced where medicine becomes complicated quickly. There are a plethora of patient presentations that can mimic benign illnesses while being much more insidious.

This idea that one cannot use Youtube to learn about medicine is a little silly. I use Wikipedia daily to further my understanding of diseases. Hell, it's usually the first place I go when I have a question.
Unable to read manifest file line too long during Java JAR packaging with Maven
Are you thinking of this as a value driven approach?
Maybe something a tiny little black hole could fix?
Not everything is taught in medical schools, which means there are gaps in knowledge. That can be problematic when a particular unique approach is more valid for a specific subset of patients. In those cases, the only way to learn how to perform those variational procedures might be by watching it online.

Would the surgeon feel confident with that situation? That's another question entirely.
MS Excel tries to be clever and disguise the most common places this is noticed.

Give it =0.1+0.2-0.3 and it will see what you are trying to do and return 0.

Give it anything slightly more complicated such as =(0.1+0.2-0.3) and this won't trip, in this example displaying 5.55112E-17 or similar.
what about when the light changes but the crowd is still moving across the intersection and the only thing that stops them is oncoming traffic inching closer and smacking the horn?

self-driving cars will need to at least be able to rev their engine and blast the horn when it detects a green light and people in the way
GRPCs Potentially Fatal Weakness
It's very common around the world in general. That doesn't make it right, of course - it just means that the surveillance state is more widespread than commonly assumed.
Just because you build a project with the second approach, it doesn’t mean you haven’t thought about alternative solutions or design like defined in the first.

A lot of times it’s useful building products by rapidly iterating because you see flaws, holes in your thinking, and get feedback immediately from people who are going to use it.

Immediate (or shorter term) feedback can be very helpful.

But to answer your question, YC talks a lot about Twitch being an example of the second approach.
The main point that should be emphasised is that any encoding with fixed size unicode codepoints is mostly unnecessary as you mostly don’t care about the codepoints but about how the resulting glyphs or even glyph runs look like.

My experience is that if you want to implement efficient unicode-aware text editor then the right datastructure is list of lines and you have to simply forget about gap buffers, ropes and what not (unless you really care about 32k+ lines/paragraphs, which is when rope-style representation starts to make sense as long as the breaks match unicode semantics)
My only beef right now with Microsoft is their insistence on having creepy telemetry in everything. As someone _very_ interested in F#, I encountered this recently with both Visual Studio Code and .NET Core.

https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093
Most Facebook employees wouldn’t trust it with their financial data: survey