skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Since Java was introduced in 1995 until today, Microsoft's software framework has had about three or four drastic backward-incompatible "generations", depending how you count. Most Java code written in 1995 will run, with little or no change, on the current JDK 13, and would compile on JDK 13 with only minor changes.

That's exactly what's wrong with Java.

That's why we got "functional interfaces" instead of proper lambdas.

That's why we got half baked generics.

That's also exactly what I'm praising C# for.

They've paid that price 4 times, and every time they added so much value that it was easily worth it to their users.

Ask the average C# developer if they'd trade for Java's half baked lambdas and generics alone for none of those generations happening, and you'd get a resounding, no way in hell.

And C# stayed relevant in enterprise despite it, I've never seen an enterprise say "we're choosing Java because 4 times since 1995 they decided to add features so incredibly powerful language features and broke backwards compatibility.

The places that couldn't handle the changes needed are also the ones that would keep running an old runtime (and old JVM if they're using Java, because any upgrade = risk, backwards compat claims or not) as long as they want, security be damned.

.NET has an insane amount of "under the hood" innovation that has happened as well in all that time by the way, I'm speaking to the programming languages, not the runtimes and platforms that enable them. It's fairly straightforward to compare language features because they started in such similar places, comparing runtimes is a much less direct comparison.
Yes - it only really caught on when the Egyptians started putting it on papyrus
John Cleese Reunites with the Dallas Man Who Brought Monty Python to America
I worked as a language teacher for a while. You see products like Duolingo come along all the time. They're always accompanied by hype in how they will help you become fluent. It's simply not the case.

The products are not necessarily useless, but they only help some people make some progress some of the time. They never live up to the hype around them.

Language acquisition is a multifaceted endeavor which takes time and effort. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or lying. (There are some outliers who can learn/acquire languages with great speed, but they're very rare.)
Firstly, consciousness is probably not well-modeled as arbitrary complexity plus X, as the complexity is likely inherent to X, and have a quite specific form. For example, it seems unlikely, on basic information-theoretic grounds, that the notoriously complex turbulent flow of a fluid in a pipe is materially closer to consciousness than laminar flow in that pipe.

Secondly, the burden of proof (or just of showing evidence) rests squarely on the person making the claim that the United States probably has it (whatever 'it' happens to be.) It is hard to do that whan you cannot say, with any specificity at all, what X is.

If your latest post is intended to be a defense of Schwitzgebel's paper, I think you are missing his point. I think he regards the consciousness of the United States counterfactually, and is attempting to show that materialism leads to an implausible conclusion, but he fails to do so, partly on account of the problem I raised in my original post.
Holdover from “Hanging Chad” Debacle Is Making It Harder to Secure Voting
Sure. My favorite explanation's a short video:

https://youtu.be/8ev9ZX9J45A
My biggest mistake working as a freelance consultant and truth be told still one of my biggest weaknesses is under estimating the the amount of work a job will require. I now tell myself any time I plan a project, whether for myself or someone else to double my estimate of the work required.

Many times it wouldn't even be my underestimating but rather the clients changing their plans halfway through and I would end up losing out rather than risking having them give me a bad review.

It is always better to estimate high then charge less than the other way around.

If you don't get a job because your too expensive don't be too upset, don't sell yourself short. IMHO it's better to not get the job than to work your fingers to the bone, miss out on other jobs and get burnt out only to go broke in the end.
> We shouldn't regulate speech, but you should own the consequences of your actions -- speech included.

This is simply terrifying. Actions should be penalized, not speech.

> If you're spreading anti-vax propaganda, you're complicit in killing kids.

People like you are what I fear the most. Using children to justify tyranny and oppression. Maybe you have good intentions but that's what the road to hell is paved with.

You do realize that your way of thinking opens up gay rights activists to prosecution for spreading HIV? What about vegan activists? Babies and even pets have been starved to death because some people followed vegan advice. Should all vegan activists be punished?

What about PR firms who create soda ads? Should we round up all of them and punish them? What about journalists? If a journalist writes a story that leads to war ( legal or illegal ) that results in the death of children, should they be prosecuted?

Should librarians be prosecuted because libraries carry offensive material that people might read to cause harm?

Also, you do realize that your system depends entirely on who is in charge rather than principles? What if anti-vaxxers are in charge. Your system allows them to mark all pro-vaxxers as criminals spreading propaganda. Do you really want to live in that kind of world?
They're not exactly forthcoming, but it's not the hyperbolic mystery the mythos would have you believe. You can piece together what matters to them - in the abstract - by searching MathSciNet for papers published by their researchers prior to joining. For example, it's pretty easy to see they hired an information theorist away from Princeton in 2017.

But obviously that's not enough to reproduce everything they do, or else they wouldn't still be legendary. As it happens a lot of what makes them successful is not the sophistication of their trading algorithms and research, but also the sophistication of the execution and reliability.

As an aside, from friends there Renaissance hires researchers in three primary ways:

1. They have a small network of professors who they solicit for promising new PhDs willing to leave academia each year.

2. They watch professors and postdocs in specific specializations, and reach out to those whose research meaningfully interacts with a thesis they're interested in internally.

3. They send small groups to conferences to poach people working elsewhere in industry (particularly tech) whose work is applicable to their own.

They also do hire people who directly apply of course, but most hires are reactive. They especially like to hire people whose work or research looks like it might begin to encroach on their own, or is just notable and impressive. The math is certainly important to them, but that's just one dimension of it.
> France already has laws covering exceptions like caricatures and quotations. That's why it's not detailed in the new article, it already exists.

Why and how would the provided exceptions to other laws do anything to this law?
If you know any linear algebra here's an example that has nothing to do with side effects:

Let X be any set. Let mX be the set of formal linear combinations of elements of X (that is, expressions like 3x₁+2x₂ where x₁ and x₂ are elements of X). Then m is a monad.

fmap is variable substitution. Ex. fmap [x₁->y₁, x₂->y₂] (3x₁ + 2x₂) = (3y₁ + 2y₂).

join is simplification of nested expressions. Ex. join (3(2x₁) + 2(x₁ + 2x₂)) = (8x₁ + 4x₂).

>>= is substitution and simplification. Ex. (3x₁ + 2x₂) >>= [x₁->3y₂, x₁->-y₂] = (3(3y₂) + 2(-y₂)) = 7y₂.

A Kleisli arrow X->mY is a system of linear equations, ie. a matrix

x₁ = 3y₁ + 6y₂
x₂ = y₁ - 2y₂

>=> is composition of linear systems, ie. matrix multiplication.

Whereas in IO you think of f >=> g as meaning "first f, then g", here f >=> g is the matrix product fg, ie. "first g, then f".
> He asked them which parts of speech should be taught first which the consultants didn't have an answer so they implemented A/B testing to see which order of words and concepts people learned fastest with.

Here's a crazy thought: People are different, and different people will have different best ways of learning a foreign language, depending on what they know beforehand, and how they like to learn.

Some people are having great success with duolingo, good for them. I'm not one of them, I think its structure sucks for me, I need way more grammar and structure rules, not an endless string of random sentences.

And the thing is, duolingo could add what I wanted to their lessons. They could absolutely add lists of pronouns or prepositions, or several sentences with small variations to their repertoire.
Is that feet as in "wear closed toed shoes" or as in running away if necessary?
Utilitarianism is illogical since its application requires ignoring the fact that utility is not singular (i.e. whose exactly utility is that?)
> this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads

Ads can also be good for competition: if your upstart product is better or cheaper ads can help you get the word out. Here's a paper that looks at the effect of advertising bans on eyeglasses, and sees that they led to higher prices: https://www.jefftk.com/benham2013.pdf

(Disclosure: I work in ads)
James Randy has a million dollars waiting for you if you can convince him that you have ESP.
Using an ineffective language learning tool to maybe memorize a handful of terms is not in real terms more useful than never getting to or dropping other methods. If anything, it’s worse because it instills people with a false sense of their progress at a real goal (language acquisition) by simulating it with a fake one (accomplishing tasks on Duolingo).
Interesting general tidbits from http://carmenere.ucsd.edu/drichert/reference_docs/Mathematic...:

"First he showed us a letter from Bob Floyd. The letter opened by saying ‘Don, Please stop
using so many exclamation points!’ and closed with at least five exclamation points. After
receiving this letter he looked in The Art of Computer Programming and found about two
exclamation points per page. (Among the other biographical tidbits we learned at this
class were that Don went to secretarial school, types 80 words per minute, and once knew
two kinds of shorthand.)

...

Upon receiving a question from the audience concerning how many times he actually
rewrites something, Don told us (part of) his usual rewrite sequence:
His first copy is written in pencil. Some people compose at a terminal, but Don says, “The
speed at which I write by hand is almost perfectly synchronized with the speed at which
I think. I type faster than I think so I have to stop, and that interrupts the flow.

...

Don, obviously a fan of rewriting in general, told us that he knows of many computer
programs that were improved by scrapping everything after six months and starting from
scratch. He said that this exact approach was used at Burroughs on their Algol compiler
in 1960 and the result was what Don considers to be one of the best computer programs
he has ever seen.

...

The last part of class was spent discussing the font used in the coming book: Euler.
The Euler typeface was designed by Hermann Zapf (“probably the greatest living type
designer”) and is an especially appropriate font to use in a book that is all about Euler’s
work.
”
> Doesn't help that legislators are absolutely clueless here.

You're a world-leading computerist and you had no clue either (nor I), how in the world are legislators supposed to do this. It's a fundamental problem. And once it's finally legislated the sme's are already on the next thing.
Same opinion. Too bad my profs don’t let me apply my idea in a more "product" way and on the languages I care about because I have a few ideas to improve the situation (one being the one I research for my PhD). So, I’m doing it on my spare time but it takes longer than I want.
I would take a coworker that is good at helping the team "vibe" and good at analyzing problems then the headphone wearing developer who only talks at standup and is really fast 1000 times out of 1000.
They're threatening a boycott. They're not actually boycotting.

I'll start paying attention when they actually start deleting repositories. That's also when Github will start paying attention; they've gotten enough warning.

But no one will actually do that, because everyone who signed this but still has a community and a repository on Github is a coward. They love all the free stuff, and they'd love for Github to just do whatever they tell them to do, but without any of that icky hard work like migrating a community to someone with more aligned morals.

Prove me wrong. Delete your account, NOW. Please. Prove me wrong. No one will. Because all anyone ever does is whine; no one acts. Its so easy to sign your name and complain; its hard to actually Act.
Hire a good tax person immediately. Maybe hire 2.

A significant amount of your income earned is gained through having someone walk you through handling taxes & health insurance. I'm not suggesting cheating on taxes. There are common practices such as knowing how to best incorporate your business for your situation. How to best pay yourself (dividends vs income) & how to handle your personal & company expenses. This can easily make a difference of between 20-30% of your income.

By a good person, I mean someone willing to sit with you for over an hour & understand you family situation, what expenses you have & what expenses you plan to have as a business. Someone who will also sit down with you once or twice a year & re-discuss as well.
Embarrassing but honest:

Pay your taxes on time (quarterly), assuming you are US based and on a 1099. Put that money away as soon as possible with ea. payment - just like an employer were withholding it.

I managed my finances poorly, and it gets increasingly difficult to catch up. All good now but was the most expensive lesson I learned.

Edit: seeing other replies here, I would meet with a tax/financial person from the start.
Setting my rates too low.

Here's what I figured out those many years ago. Clients who are cheap are also really into wasting your time and trying to micromanage the project. Clients who will pay a lot more also give you latitude to do your job (after all they're paying you to be the expert).

Keep jacking up your rates with each new client until you hit a ceiling. Whatever you're charging now, without even knowing what it is, I'm certain it's too low.

When I got started I billed $35/he. When I ended 5-6 years later I billed $300/her. Now in what very limited ad-hoc consulting I do, I bill significantly more than that.
Flutter has similar tradeoffs as other cross platform tech such as React Native. Its great for simple apps that don't need platform specific UI or services.
Ships are not efficient?
> When I used to build docker images they would sometimes take hours, for things that were less than a minute on x86.

That is almost certainly because it was pulling a majority of prebuilt binaries, IIUC.
> The structure of what might have happened does not affect those ratios. Only what was observed does.

This is true in the sense that you only compute conditional probabilities for the data that was actually observed, not data that could have been observed but wasn't.

However, there's more to it than that; I'll post upthread in a moment with more detail.
I agree with you and very well said. The US seems to be especially rife with these revolving doors tacit relationships, also often cemented through family or kinship.
I just struggle to see the real challenge in this argument. I can see that simulating something more complex than a Go game is a real engineering challenge - simulating a Go game from start to finish is really easy apart from assigning a value function to each move.

That being said:

> hidden information forces you to manage how much you reveal to your opponent

It is hard to see how that could be harder for a learning AI to pick up than any other game action with long-term benefits. It might reveal that AI are so much better at humans in games like Go and Chess that they aren't even exploiting long-term links between cause and effects, but I suspect from the example we've seen with Go that this is a solved problem.

> and requires you to simulate multiple "alternate futures" based on things you learn after making a decision,

That is describing a tree search. Why is that theoretically difficult? I can see it is a real engineering challenge to simulate a complex environment.

> and randomness is equivalent to an extra player that makes irrational unpredictable moves.

Computers handle randomness much better than humans at all levels because they have an actual statistical grounding. They still aren't very good at it, but they sure thrash humans.

I suppose basically I can see why a hidden-information game could be intractable because simulating the environment is so hard that it can't be done and breakthroughs in simulation must be found to train the AI. But I don't see why that is being linked to hidden information and cooperative gameplay. We know humans do fine without utilising hidden information, because they can play these games and they don't know any hidden information.
No wonder they build separate driver toilets at their HQ.
The gains from GM crops are a lie[1] - most GM crops are made so agri-chemical companies can sell more pesticide for pesticide-resistant crops. Overuse of pesticides is killing all the insects and ruining soil quality.[2]

If you want to get more efficiency out of the food system you can easily do that by going vegan. Raising livestock provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland. If you cut out meat you get 83% of the farmland back. You don't even need to cut out meat completely - just have a couple more meals each week without meat and you're saving many times more than any GM crops could achieve.

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/failure-yield-evaluating-pe...

[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...
The documented examples showing how LiveData “should” be used comprise a masterclass on overengineering.
The United States and Germany during WWII, as evidenced by Ford, General Motors, IBM, Coca-Cola, Kodak, Chase Bank, Random House, Associated Press, Dow Chemical, Brown Brothers Harriman, Woolworths, Alcoa, AT&T, and others.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

https://www.phactual.com/8-american-companies-that-worked-wi...

https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-american-companies-that-aided...
Just a few hours ago I saw this post on Product Hunt: "Freelancember is a collection of 31 gifts for freelancers, one for each day. Templates, checklists, guides how to get better clients, raise your rates, etc." Might be helpful! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/freelancember

Some other folks mentioned taxes -- I highly suggest reading the book Profit First and implementing the system. I'm not a freelancer myself, but I'm solo & self-employed, and it's such a relief to have a pre-destined pile of cash to be sent off to the appropriate authorities each quarter.
TV programming is the USA was pretty much created when advertisers realized the potential of the medium yet understood that no one would watch ads non-stop, which is why the had talk shows, tv series, game shows, etc made. The first TV ad - for Bulova watches - dates back to 1941, just two years after the first TV sets were sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair.
Interesting. In .NET Core 2.1, they decided just 30 calls was enough to recompile from the fast “tier 0” JIT code to the fully optimized “tier 1” JITed code.

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/...
> I’ve never heard of anyone learning a language by passively listening to Spotify

Maybe not, but learning a language by passively listening to podcasts is a popular strategy.
> I don't want my browser to keep changing its screen size.

Neither do I. I'm taking about how useless it is to use these metrics to identify bots, sine any bot can easily circumvent them, and with far more less hassle than a user.

The fingerprinting is "for" fraud, but is not very useful in that context. The fallout is that all our privacy is worse though.

> I disagree ... the fact that they haven't been able to eliminate it

They haven't eliminated it because it still works well enough on end users, even though the narrative is that it's to prevent fraud.

Fingerprinting works for users, but for any halfway competent adversary it's close to useless. Just keep that in mind when it's brought up as a solution to fraud and that's why it's worth allowing.
Nice app... for the communist intelligence services.

I am still trying to figure out why would anyone want to even attempt to use this crap. Stay the hell away and you won't have privacy issues.
I don't think I would. I already have the experience of immersion with current screens. I don't think strapping screens to my face will improve anything. And given the metaphorical and literal headaches of trying to fool the human vision system, I don't expect that I'd enjoy anything in the facehugger category.

This might change for me if we could bypass the eyeballs and the limbs, of course.
Charge more. If you can't find clients, the answer is to get a job and build your experience/network, not to lower your rates.
Nick Patterson has said they never used anything more complicated than linear regression whilst he was there. The trick was how to use it, not the tool itself...I think people who read a lot of textbooks get obsessed with finding the next complex "secret silver bullet" technique. Good analytical work with basic techniques is often more worthwhile.
What are some ways to (a) tell a good tax person from a bad one and (b) look for a tax person in such a way that increases your odds of finding a good one?
> when the iMac decided not to include a 3 1/4 drive people grumbled but it was mostly dead tech, writable CDs had become wide spread enough to obsolete it

The G3 iMac did not include a CD writer, so if you wanted to use writable CD to get data out of your iMac, you needed to buy an external drive.

You aren't quite right on writable CD being wide spread then--you are early by at least a year or two. When the G3 iMac came out CD-R drives were still above $300, and CD-RW drives were above $450. CD-R discs were around $2 a disc, and CD-RW discs were more like $15-20 a disc. (I'm getting prices from the November 1998 issue of MacWorld).

My recollection is that the usual ways people dealt with the lack of floppy were:

1. External floppy drive.

2. Iomega Zip drive. An external Zip drive suitable for use with the G3 iMac was about $120 when that iMac came out.

3. Ethernet to exchange files with another computer on the LAN that does have a floppy.
If I were a defense customer I'd just ask for good-enough but more secure processor model.

Not a big deal.
Love this comment! Still, XTX is a cool name, even if the author of the article didn't really get it: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2624986/the-meaning... . The nice thing is no VCs are really necessary to fund trading firms like this. Usually the owners have 100% of the capital, split between one or more owners. Not positive of XTX's capital structure, but it is unusual to have VCs involved. GETCO was an exception, and they were pressed to eventually go public (as KCG): https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KCG/