skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These features are good (except I think Function.prototype.toString is a mistake).

(An alternative to String.prototype.trimStart would be to use String.prototype.replace, although trimStart would probably be more efficient.) Still some things missing includes: a goto command, ability to disable automatic semicolon insertion, macros, enhanced regular expressions, and a built-in regular expression quotation function (it is easily enough to implement in JavaScript, but it seem to me the kind of thing that should be built-in).
"Automation inherently strongly favors capital over labor"

That's an odd thing to say. If machines and programs are capital, which seems reasonable, the more automation there is, the more capital, which drives down the returns and makes labor relatively more expensive. Isn't this obviously happening in a world where savings accounts pay 0.01% but it costs $120/hr to hire a plumber?

Maybe it would be better to say that the extremely low returns on capital favor automation, which favors the people who make the highest wages. That's obviously? not the same as capital vs. labor.
To be clear, everyone does this. Rich people often have more opportunity.

What's really concerning is that people change how they interpret facts in order to rationalize the same decisions.
Famously, neither of his companies are even remotely profitable, and he has one of the most prominent reputations in the world to help him raise endless investor funds- either from private investors or retail ones. Both of his companies have been burning cash for close to two decades now! To my understanding SpaceX- which just raised another funding round despite never being profitable for a minute- doesn't even have a realistic path to profitability other than a handwavey 'we'll somehow establish a global wireless Internet from satellites' sort of plan
No input on the article - I’m just stoked to see the hunting public well represented here on HN.

That is very cool to me as a fellow outdoorsman.
In fact many of the animals that could or have actively preyed on humans are mammals: large felines, and to a lesser extent, canines. Reptiles probably take second place though thanks to crocs.
How does this change when you're heavily punished for ending up with a much lower number (e.g., in finding a partner, biz deal, etc)?

Among a set of losing plays, I presume it's 50/50 on whether you turn over every card (and end up with the last one). So a third of the time you end up in the optimal case, another third you end up doing pretty well, and another third you're subject to absolutely random chance. Guess this is an argument for satisficing vs optimizing in most real world applications.
Completely agreed, that liquidity spectrum still holds though. Closer to 100% of treasury trading than M&A can be automated, but tools can certainly increase the efficiency of the M&A process and reduce headcount if demand doesn’t grow in kind.
Wait, what?! Why?!

I am not asking for any utopia. What I am asking is "Instead of setting ourselves for failure every time coming up with some scheme for testing performance, why can't we just use actual performance on the activity that we want to evaluate candidates"?

It works for people in sports. It works for trade professions. It works for traders. It works for performers, entertainers, even entrepreneurs.

Why can't we have an educational system that does not put people on tracks to mold them and instead just coach them to follow whatever path they seem fit?
Sure, though the first Friedmann equation, or any other equation, where terms are balanced, e.g. a + b = 0, doesn't tell you anything about causality, though redshifting of light is exactly caused by expansion, so it is not strange that both are "balanced".
> Beyond that, in my opinion, nearly anyone with average programming experience can hack a typical programming/whiteboard interview

I agree with your conclusion that all it does is filter out inexperienced/incompetent candidates. This is valuable, but to me it's the "first question" - can they code?

I don't think there's really much value between an "Amazing coder" and a "can get the job done" coder. Very rapidly you're trying to answer much softer questions like "does this person work well others?" or "how fast can they learn new systems?" and there isn't a good way to do that.

The interview question I usually give is algorithmically very simple. There's no linked lists, no graph theory, none of that. What I actually look for is mostly how they interact with me and how they go about solving it.

There's a pretty straightforward gotcha that more or less everyone hits. If the candidate hits the gotcha and then keeps piling on special cases without ever taking a step back, that's a big minus. If they keep doing it even after I suggest there's a simpler solution, that's worse still. I much prefer somebody who takes a step back but can't quite figure it out without a little more help than one who just remains confident in their solution no matter what.

Yeah it's inherently shitty that I have 45 minutes to figure out if this person will benefit the org for years to come, but there's a lot more signal there than just "Did they open their CS 201 algorithms textbook in the last few week?"
> Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

I think this is a bit harsh. Is artwork a waste of good canvas?

(I guess to be fair to you here, at least canvas is a renewable resource)
I love the plug for Person of Interest and was surprised that the original ones from the Air Force ended up there.
Reminded me of "bitsquatting": http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html

I wonder if anyone is doing this regularly. I didn't hear much about it after the initial fanfare.
In my experience working with other programmers, it is very common for people to only learn to visually pattern match on code formatting and stop there. This is the code reading equivalent of functional illiteracy. Using = instead of ==, missing break statements, all kinds of semantically significant mistakes become completely invisible when you look at the shape of the code instead of reading to see what it does. In my experience, people who can only read code by visual layout do very poor code reviews.

Another annoying thing, as you point out, is that this makes people hung up on code formatting style to an unreasonably extreme degree. People who only learn to look at the layout literally cannot "read" an unfamiliar layout, which tends to frustrate them, and in a lot of cases seems to hurt their ego, because their conception of themselves as competent programmers is challenged.

The way to "reconcile" that is to learn to read code for its meaning.
Florida Shooting Updates
Is this the beginning of Google's wind-down of "cloud services", as part of the de-emphasis of Alphabet and the refocus on the core ad business?
Possibly. But for a little while, I did hear about "lifestyle businesses", i.e., the idea that you could be financially sustainable in tech without needing massive growth.

And these days, I think most of the open source software I use was actually contributed by a corporation.
I made another chart back in 2016 to show how over a decade the iPhone became such a truly once-in-a-lifetime product: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-...

(As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo...)

By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. By 2015 it was several times larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together.

Which is why, even though I'm not the world's biggest Apple fan, it always amuses me to hear people complain that Tim Cook hasn't pulled another iPhone out of his hat. The iPhone was the kind of hit that only comes along every two or three decades. I'm struggling to think of anyone who's produced two hits on that scale.
I don't think it had ever been filmed so clearly before, if it all.

Besides, I wouldn't waste your time nitpicking what someone blurts out in a moment of excitement.
some of the stuff they do really is stupid. I literally can't buy an apple computer with a mainstream desktop processor. they sell laptops and two different desktop computers that use laptop parts. or I can pay $6k for the pro tower with xeon parts. why do they have to make it so hard for me to get a machine that compiles code targeting their own desktop OS?
Google is simply an ad company with a search engine that monetizes all your data. They exist to serve ads. The rest is window dressing.
Not sure what you mean here. Would a similarly architected non-distributed system have higher levels of availability?
- If both devices are under a NAT the packets flow relayed through a server? (or in cases where direct connection can be established somehow)

- And if direct connection is available (both in the same LAN) the flow is direct? (reducing latency)

If yes, is this done automatically?

If I'm not mistaken this what Logmein Hamachi does. I experience low lat/high speed in the LAN and in a few cases high latency in some devices (due the "relayed mode"), when direct link is not established.

Good part is that it seamless for the end user... best case is found automatically and transparently.
Because no matter how advanced of a computer hardware/software you build, you will not have a 'mind' in it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Hypothesis: McDonald's pays brilliant automation or engineering type minds to do difficult to automate work like we are discussing here. Big salaries. Only part time. The other half is spent on the engineering. Make these jobs sought after.

Slowly the org transitions to much higher paid people in these roles across the board.

I think part of it is mgmt types think they save money reducing wages for the most numerous type of employee and it creates a black hole race to the bottom.

High end restaurants have very well paid front of house because they have a financial incentive to perform. Cashiers don't.
Paul, though he doesn't reference his previous essay [0] (which has a section on gaming the system) in the current one, did write then that fooling the investors and treating it like a test is only going to delay the inevitable.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/before.html
This is an initial phone screen and in this context this a valuable approach. This is one level past fizzbuzz. 'Can you code something past "hello world"?' is what they're looking for. There's nothing worse than an onsite with somebody who just cannot code at all.
Ironically, this is the kind of massive research that got Sony into troubles because it costed a ton and was hard for developers to master (SEGA felt this hard a decade prior), hence the Nintendo U-turn and Sony/Microsoft 90% mainstream hardware follow-up.
Except most of the profits from the productivity gains of automation have been going to off shore megacorp tax havens.
Basic research is still very expensive. The "two guys in a garage" model is about reaping the fruits of basic research, e.g. taking something invented in a lab somewhere and turning it into an actual product. Take away the labs, though, and you're taking away the seeds that the people in the garages plant, water and serve up on plates.
Ah, yes, though that just reinforces the point. Thanks.
CO2 emissions are globally fungible, that's the whole idea of the climate change problem. So I don't understand the marketing of "carbon neutral" products. You can produce an infinite amount of carbon neutral stuff, and it has no more value than printing a label. The idea of a bottom-up solution makes no sense to me.

The idea of building up carbon neutrality bit by bit reminds me of Eddie Lampert's much ridiculed apparent belief that you can build a profitable company by having smaller parts of it compete to make profits.
I've never done that (self-taught dev), but I've set up SSO, terraformed production systems, wrote ETLs for system critical data... I'm not an amazing developer, but I get things done. That test would filter me out simply because I've never tried it before.
I see your point, but numbers are easier to standardize than dates, so there is some logic to drawing the line there. It has to be drawn somewhere.
I think they're being sarcastic? The idea with a distributed system is if one part goes down it can still mostly function, which google have managed to fail at somehow.
Israeli startup claims to succeed where Theranos failed
The PS3's CPU was a single general-purpose core and 6 SIMD coprocessors.

It was crap for creating games (and a pain in the ass to develop for), but it was great for pure compute.

By comparison the 360 used a trio of a similar general-purpose core without the SIMD processors on the side[1] had significantly less pure compute power.

[1] but with better built-in SIMD: the PS3's general-purpose core had a single internal SIMD unit while each of the 360's had 2, the 360's SIMD units were also improved with games-relevant operations and 4x the number of SIMD registers
If you meant to say that no commercial implementations are shown on the benchmarks game website — that is not true.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

and

"Largest Provider of Commercial Smalltalk

...Cincom is the largest commercial provider of Smalltalk in the world, with twice as many partners and customers than all other commercial providers combined."

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/
There is a difference between hiding your involvement and not going out of your way to draw attention to it.
Ben Franklin's Experiments with Electricity
Consider using a monospace font. It is difficult to tell how large one number is relative to another when each digit has a different width
Nope, completing the square is primarily used to translate a standard quadratic function into a vertex form quadratic so it can be graphed using transformations instead of guessing.

It is an essential multi-use tool in precalculus. The thing we should dump is the quadratic formula.
World's largest periodic table at WA university adds to Australia's Big Things
Seeing this long later, but thank you for the detailed reply.
pdf: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2019-bernstein.pdf
Yup. Unschooling has some tendency to become an ideology instead of a practical point of view, and people get stuck in it. When all your homeschooling friends are stuck in it too, it becomes hard to get out of it even when it's not working well.
> In the wild, there have been no fatal attacks on humans and only one reported bite

I don't think the one reported bite counts as an attack.
I love this and the previous two posts!

This is extremely pertinent to me as I have written my own "semantic search engine" and extractive summarizer using word vectors and it is available here:

https://www.nlpsearch.io

So far, it's using a 100D glove model (very simple and not all that good compared to BERT et al) for performance reasons and because I'm hosting it for free with AWS

A much more fleshed out version of my extractive summarizer with a CLI (supporting all major language models like GPT-2) is also available here:

https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8

I love reading about how 0x65.dev is dealing with issues I've ran into. Trying to index large numbers of text vectors is a headache for me, and at the moment that I saw this, I was writing code to get the popular approximate nearest neighbors library "Annoy" to work with my research engine.

As far as the issues that other HN users noted ("Isn't average pooling not that great?) the answer is "Yeah we know but there's literally nothing better". They authors mentioned using a weighted average of vectors, which I assume is being weighted using tf-idf over the word vectors. I've read several papers which say that doing this is not necessarily better than traditional averaging. I've found some success with concatenating average and max and min pooled vectors together before cosine similarity searches - but it's certainly not a good fix and is much slower for not a lot of gain

If anyone is a total nerd about word/document vectors and wants to chat / brainstorm about applying text vectors to search / extractive summarization - please contact me! I'm desperate to work with others on this problem!
I didn't mean to imply that he thinks that. Sorry for the apparent ambiguity.

"Wealth" is still problematic, as per the cigarette example.
So I won't say whose side I am on, or where I stand on social policies, but I think it is important for both sides of the aisle to realize that once you give people any sort of entitlement, it becomes exactly that an entitlement that people feel entitled to.
By so doing you make incredibly difficult if not impossible to ever introduce any changes to it later no matter what is going on, wars, natural disasters, etc. In the end short term thinking by politicians wishing to cash in on votes no matter what they are voting for will end up hurting things far more than someone who takes a long term perspective.
Very cool! :)
That's why I wrote "more or less stationary", which is describing 1000km/s compared to double the speed of light that would come from naive calculation.
From Complexity to Perplexity (1995)
The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU, and not the GPU.

As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high performance vector processing units, and was so optimized for compute throughput it used two different floating point formats, neither of which are compatible with the IEEE754 standard that every other piece of hardware you've ever touched uses. The PS3 was the culmination of that philosophy, with the Cell being explicitly developed to put as much raw number crunching hardware in something that can still be called a CPU. It was just a single unimpressive POWER-compatible CPU core, and 60% of its die area went to specifically engineered number crunching units. This is what made it "supercomputer grade".

There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future. Sony compromised and introduced a standard Geforce GPU. Compared to the more conventional architecture of the Xbox 360, the compromised design still had slightly more potential but it was a lot more difficult to work with for games, and more expensive to produce as well.

Starting with the last generation of consoles, homegrown graphics architectures aren't tried anymore. You can only get performance and especially good developer buy-in on commodity hardware. As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Their successors will too. The Nintendo Switch shares a chip with the Nvidia Shield TV and Google Pixel C tablet. Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.
Yes. Do you believe that a HN discussion of a company owned by Microsoft that doesnt draw attention to that and which markets towards privacy-focused users would he received positively?
No, the original APL notation was used to describe the operation of IBM mainframe processors.
I think that with not too much more effort from your part then my comments could have been understood more charitably.

Rephrasing: I find it funny that the only response from the government is to encourage women to get married, rather than encourage men to take part in raising children, or even encouraging other forms of raising children than the traditional micro family.
> And yes, rent isn't value-creating.

Some rents create value.

Say that I am a construction company and I need a huuuuge crane to complete a building. I can borrow money to buy the crane (rent goes to the person who lent me capital) or I can lease the crane (rent goes to the person who lent me capital in the form of a crane). Either way, no rent no new building. Someone values the building otherwise I wouldn't be building it. Hence, rent creates value.

Suppose I am a working stiff and I need a huuuuge house to raise a family. I can borrow money to buy a house (rent goes to the person who lent me capital) or I can lease a house (rent goes to the person who lent me capital in the form of a house). Either way, no living space no family. I value my family otherwise I wouldn't be building it. Hence, rent creates value.
Is it just me or are Discord's status updates legendarily bad to the point of being entirely useless? As a user of the discord app, don't tell me the "API is having issues." Just tell me, "Discord is currently down. We are working on it and apologise for the disruption." Everything else is unnecessary line noise.
[EDIT] Everyone please ignore this comment. It is totally wrong.

> If what we’re seeing was 13.8B light years away 13.8B years ago and are now 46B light years away, wouldn’t that mean that those things traveled ~32.2B light years in 13.8B years.

No. What we're seeing was 13.8BLY away (in our reference frame) when the light was emitted. Those things are 46BLY away now (again, in our reference frame) but we can't see them now, we can only see them as they were 138B years ago.
Another example of this technique is https://sequencediagram.org
I don't recall E3. But there really WAS an IBM editor XEDIT, written on his own by an IBM guy in Paris. He understood elegance. Its macro language was Rexx. KEdit is a PC version of XEDIT.
Valves Proton enabled me to switch fully to Linux once and for all. The few games that wont run now are far more acceptable than not being able to play virtually any mainstream titles. Its surprising how well it works to me and reaffirms my support for Valve and the Steam store.
The categories of errors - and Google's ability to recognize and respond to those errors in rapid form - has always seemed extraordinarily slow and reticent compared to AWS. It's one of the concerns I'd have when recommending it.
I bet I can guess whose side you are on and where you stand on social policies? The way you framed the situation always leaves little crumbs for others to explore.
Mentioning the cause of the issue seems better than just "shits broke yo" to me.
yes, they're moving out of a profitable business where they have a lot of knowledge about.

and they start this move with an outage during the busiest time of the year

why not?
>Not when something is wrong, just when I don’t want to spend too much time trying to figure something out.

That is how support should work in general. Support has become so much "thats outside the scope of your contract" or "blame other vendor" instead of a shortcut to training. If my provider has already seen a problem I've run into, its in their best interest to get me moving again, so I can use more of their product and extend their tentacles further into my business.
Science education is hard. I was constantly frustrated in science classes, especially physics, because every 2 minutes I wanted to say "but then why ___?" Every new thing you learn seems to contradict either common sense (this rock clearly falls faster than this paper!), or something else you've been taught (you mean F=ma was never actually true? and which other equations might turn out to need correcting?).

I recognize it's not feasible for a class of students to constantly interrupt a lecture. The questions that other students had were never the same ones that I had, either. The problem is indeed scale, but I don't think motivation is a primary factor. Eventually you learn to be quiet and accept what the teacher and the textbook say.