skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pressure to do something meaningful and useful
Lately I've been feeling what I think is too much pressure to do something meaningful and useful.

I've found it hard to focus on my regular work and other trivial tasks because they don't feel meaningful enough - but not just that!

It seems that even things that are at first glance meaningful, such as learning more about AI or getting into game development or testing SaaS ideas, have become not the "perfect" use of my time.

It seems like I'm not satisfied unless I find the holy grail of how to spend my time.

It might be that I spend too much time on my own and my brain is trying to tell me that I need to have more people around me and a shared purpose, otherwise the survival instinct of not being on my own in the woods kicks in.

I feel like I need to explore all the communities, know what's going on in every industry, think about the best way to help society & make money & save the planet at the same time, and what happens is I just end up browsing the internet and consuming other people's content instead of actually creating something.

There might be some value in consuming a lot of content I'm sure, but is not having any output because other people's output is already better a justification?

Have you guys dealt with this before? How do you accept that there's no perfect way to spend your time and doing anything is better than doing nothing at all?
Quite the opposite.

The point of insurance is to replace a high variance distribution of potential losses with a low variance distribution, but with a similar expected loss. In other words, on average you pay a bit more, but you never pay a huge amount.

Now, in a perfect world, everyone would pay exactly what their expected loss is, plus a small premium. Since it's impossible to measure the expected loss exactly, in reality some people pay a bit more and some pay a bit less. Getting a better risk estimate doesn't get you closer to "not having insurance", but rather closer to "perfect insurance" where everyone gets a distribution that exactly matches their risk profile.
It's even worse than that. Most of the GPS child watches or other trackers use a few large Chinese providers; they have little or no security on their APIs and administrative panels, (absolutely no API key authentication in at least one case, or `admin`, `admin` type defaults that don't get changed) so don't ever buy any GPS tracking watches for your child.
Nice story, but please mind your language a little
Main Why You Need to Build Your App with Appgeyser
Diogenes and Definitions
The problem with pooling risk is if the risks (ie people) are seperable, there's an adverse selection problem. People who can see they are a lower risk will evaporate from the pool, leaving the higher risk people who then would have to pay a higher premium for the pool to break even.
Many American houses indeed have terrible sound-proofing. But placing a higher value on that surely isn't why people in poor countries build of concrete blocks. Wood is plentiful in the US, and labor is expensive, this is mostly what drives the difference.
That's a nice coincidence. What actually made me think of this in the first place was video game live-streaming. I improved much more by watching someone play a bit than reading about it or trying it just on my own. That made me think of the same thing in the workplace. I think being able to see live programming is really useful in the same manner.
Discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766781
Panel: What size pants do you require?

Button: Note sure. Hold on, let me call my mother about that.
What's the go-to book on compilers in this day and age?
FuckAdBlock 3.2.1
Yes. They'd hire someone like Wayne Dyer to develop treatment plans at a psychiatric hospital. My favorite personal example was when my employer hired a management engineering consultant company to help people who spent their time in meetings to trim fat, i.e., fire people who did the work. One of the ways that was used to help us dumb people understand what a quality product is was to ask us which restuarant has a higher quality product: a gourmet steakhouse or McDonald's. The answer? It was supposed to be a 'gotcha' of course. People inevitably answered the "gourmet steakhouse", but our brilliant teacher laid down some truth that day: McDonald's is of equally high quality because they do very well at providing a consistent product throughout all of their franchises. I told her that there's a difference between consistency and quality. A consistently low quality product is still a low quality product. Management just didn't get it. This was at a time in the early 90s when my employers touted themselves as being a "World Class Hospital". What kind of claim is that when American hospitals were world beaters?
Dimensionality Reduction Using Principal Component Analysis
This is a circle that is going on for very long I think.

People with private locked garage will also have better ratings in general. Wealthier places will also invest more in road maintenance and limiting accident factors (for instance having a ton more protective equipment near school zones, investing in underground parking near shopping areas etc.)

In general I feel that trying to legally screen info from insurance is a lost proposition, as they have all the data in the world and find a proxy for that info anyway.
But 128 bits ought to be enough for everybody (see version 4 UUID).
This looks like dataflow programming to me and the big downside are the so called "glitches". We want to react to every change but at the same time we want some changes to happen simultaneously.

const data = useMemo(() => (
expensive(a,b,c)
), [a,b,c])

Now image a,b,c all change at the same time in response to a button press. How often is expensive() going to be called? 3 times? That will take too long. 1 time? That's unpredictable.
> We don't get a choice in this— we do it because the alternative is being killed in the street

Is this commonplace in the US? In the UK most streets are safe to walk down (even some country roads which don't have pavements/sidewalks). In the UK there isn't such thing as jaywalking (etc) so it is the drivers responsibility to give way to pedestrians even when those pedestrians aren't following the highway code themselves.
Yes I do. Because I genuinely want others to benefit from problems I've solved so that they can focus on other things.

As a developer I struggled writing functional tests. So my company sponsors a team to build and maintain two OSS projects https://gauge.org and https://taiko.dev that makes testing reliable and simple.

We are trying our best to listen to users and help them out. It's been the most rewarding part of my career.
That's a feature, not a bug. I want to rely on well tested, stable, mature libraries that receive security updates and don't change for the next 3 to 5 years.
Yeah, this feature being part of an A/B test makes sense.

Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
And also equipped with a firm knowledge that flavor of ice cream can't be the problem. Thus naturally looking at all other variables
Technical Writing Trends for 2020
I agree with that.

20 years ago I started using Delphi and it was great. The debugger then was much better than GDB is now; the form designer better than current ides; it compiles projects faster on 20 year old hardware than current languages compile on current hardware; with copy-on-write strings it basically had mutability xor aliasing for strings.

But no one wants to use Delphi anymore, because it is not open-source.

Unfortunately I made my projects open-source, and now need to keep maintaining them.
But there is no advantage being open-source. There are almost no contributions, because no one knows Delphi/Pascal anymore. There are basically no maintained, working libraries to use.
I have even ported my projects to FreePascal/Lazarus, the open-source Delphi alternative. But that made everything worse. Open-source is incredible buggy.

Things I had to deal with this week: Recent binutils versions have relro enabled by default, but their relro is not compatible with FreePascal. With relro enabled my apps do not start anymore. The string builder in FreePascal allocates buffers that are too small for its data. When GDB catches an exception in a GTK2 GUI while a menu is open, it freezes the entire X server. You have to leave the X server and kill gdb from another tty, before you can even move the mouse again.
The *True* Prisoner’s Dilemma
I'm 37 and I've never really owned a smart phone. I'm a Software Engineer, and I fear I would be one of those people that compulsively checks the thing every 35 seconds. I'm much happier having conversations with people around me than starting into a phone, and for me it's easier to just not have the temptation.

Technically I do have a 6 year old Android something-or-other my sister gave me that I use sometimes on wifi (no sim card in it).

I do think I might get a sim for it soon for the convenience, though my usage plan will be different than most people.

Leave the phone off 99% of the time, and just turn it on when I want to use it for something - make a call or send an email.

Install zero apps so I never get notifications or have to deal with things that intrude into my life.

Essentially I will have the phone so I can use it when I want, but not so that it can get my attention when I don't want. It will be an interesting experiment.
Given the rampant discrimination against men that exists in the modern tech sector and that even stating "maybe women naturally prefer to do other jobs than tech" gets you fired, what exactly do you have in mind that would make it even more welcoming?
> Hundreds of years from now, any dinosaurs we recreate will be the result of creative genetic engineering and imagination.

Not to mention machine learning. I wonder if we get a bunch of samples from different individuals, could an AI simply just piece it all together?
>I pretty much never learned anything of note directly from a teacher.

I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on. It's this interaction that I find valuable, not just stating facts on a blackboard. As I have taught mathematics myself at the university level, I find that students don't really need me to read them the facts, I was more there to align their understanding.

As for consistency, I meant that you won't get to cherry-pick the topics that you like when learning on your own (or solve the problem sets that you find simple), which is a natural thing to do by the way. If you have your own curriculum and you stick to it, that's great, but I have found that when I allowed students to pick their own problems for homework, they grew weaker in some areas and stronger in others. This also didn't give me enough signal on their understanding in general, which meant that it deprived them of useful feedback.

> but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets.

Absolutely! I didn't mean consistency in terms of pushing out duplicates of the same, but consistency in terms of attacking a variety of problems in some course, allowing you to become well-rounded in your understanding. Once you reach that level, you can fill in the gaps and be comparable to a colleague that maybe had a slightly different curriculum.
Clean Code Applied to JavaScript
I just drove 35,000 miles around the US this summer through about 30 states, and OSM had absolutely every single road, intersection and detail I could ever hope for perfectly mapped. I used it solely for navigation in a ton of places I've never been before, and it was brilliant.

What do you see lacking in your city?
Come on, you can't mention zebrafish gills without actually telling the story!
Sure, that's great it's written down. Doesn't mean we have to agree to the rules.

The complaints about paywalled articles are warranted, and we should take a stance about it whether the debate itself is viewed as off-topic or not. It's turned into a form of protest, at this point.
Except that standard...isn't. It's what some ancient version of MSIE did and that used to count for a standard in Triassic; nowadays, it gets passed around as cargo cult advice. (The relevant RFC recommends no more than 8000 bytes, sure.)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim...
These rules are also on Google's Machine Learning Guide[1]. I find the website easy to parse. Definitely an awesome resource to review before jumping into any ML project!

[1] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/guides/rules-...
Learn Backpropagation for Machine Learning
Wifi doesnt often work outside at airports, where you actually find and get in the car.
From what I hear the Lead Architect of Teams used to work on Lync. So I can easily agree that Teams is a child of Lync. Some things are improved though I hear a lot of people having issues with Teams sadly.
> It can also take significantly less time.

Strong opinion, but I think that if you want to learn facts, you can learn them faster on your own. If you want to learn a new skill, you need somebody to check your ideas until you can get to a level where you can self-correct yourself.

> II'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.

Sure, and I agree, most of the time I would prefer to study on my own instead of going to the lecture. However, it was incredibly useful to have an expert that could align my understanding whenever I was off to the wrong path; I think those were the opportunities for learning, not reading facts of off the board.

> There's no guarantee of that in any case.

Let's say that it's significantly more likely that you have practised on a variety of easy to hard problems in your field of interest if you have taken good courses from a university versus doing your own work. I believe that when you pick your own homework, it's natural to cherry-pick problems that seem simple.

> I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field.

That would (and does) describe research divisions in industry too.
no, 1.68MB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format
Security flaws are almost expected in devices like this. While parents equipping their children with these watches are probably a security risk themselves, I believe the realities of software development can explain the flaws we are seeing. I doubt the software has seen any tests at all. The developers are probably happy that it works at all.
so making law that keeps everyone in the pool will fix that right?
I don't think it's uniquely American at all. It's weird to me that some places don't feel this way. Remember that every state-caused atrocity is aided by the police in some way. Even if you're okay with the police right now, you might not be in 30 years.

Also, I think the chance of the police (as a group) not being corrupt is about the same as politicians (as a group) not being corrupt - essentially zero. The incentives just aren't there for there to be no corruption in law enforcement. And even if there's no corruption in law enforcement and your government is great, you still have to remember that police officers generally aren't the cream of the crop of society. They make mistakes and there usually isn't much recourse.
Original thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16253193
Good move. Other browsers should follow.
Maybe this is the same effect as when Hollywood tries to convert a novel to the screen. Often they'll spend half of their time budget on a decent adaptation of the first couple of chapters, then have to rush through the rest.
Yikes I had not even thought of that. How long till they install CT OS from Watch Dogs? I mean really that game is now about to be a documentary of the future. I hope not.
There are a lot of people creating software/specifications without knowing what they are doing and it scares me.
Why is "eavesdropping" on children such a big issue? Our "adult" devices may or may not be eavesdropping on us at all times.
This is exactly why Apache still rocks.

Software developer got greedy, rich and robbed by state actors.

Should have contributed to Apache instead.
Even papyrus scrolls not already charred by historical events (e.g., at Pompeii and Herculaneum) were often considered incense and burned by their discoverers.

One shudders....
Cookie STATUS: Various tracking protection mechanisms in major browsers
struct http_response_s* response = http_response_init();

Is just C++ with extra steps
Yes, I agree! So this woman feels sexy and al I think it she looks like a doll. But still.. in a way it's also a supernormal stimulus for the opposite sex and is on its way to becoming the new standard, the same way people tend to descend into stranger and stranger fetishes and finding it harder and harder to get aroused by normal "human" partners.

I really don't like it. Though I will admit, such a fake face does tickle the fancy. As said, a supernormal stimulus. I guess when such make up can be applied in a second using technology, the world will change forever.

By the way, in "Stories of Your Life and Others" form Ted Chiang, there is a story where this sensitivity for beauty can be turned off, everybody does this but then someone stops doing it. It's a fascinating story, and very relevant, the story is "Liking What You See: A Documentary" [0]: "it consists of interviews with dozens of people at a high school in the US doing a pilot project with a future technique called “calliagnosia”. This is a neurological intervention that reliably and reversibly deadens that part of the brain that responds aesthetically to the human face."

[0] http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=5604
I have plenty of love for academia (PhD here) but it does, like most large institutions and corporations, show a tendency to become a huge feedback loop that interfaces only with itself and excludes the society at large, apart from siphoning money from it.

We should make efforts to overcome the friction of opening up and reaching out no matter where we work. That keeps organizations healthy and sane.
> if like me you only stumble on the website through news aggregators like this one you probably won't have any issues to get to the article without paying,

99.9% of the time I land on these sites is from a HN link. Most of the time I don’t find the first paragraph interesting enough to keep reading and close it. I get hit by those paywalls a lot.
any plans to use traditional adobe?
The Extraordinary Link Between Neural Networks and the Nature of the Universe
Only watched the video, but one of the interesting things is the potential method to tell a generated image from a real one: namely, if you take a generated image, it's possible to find parameters which will generate exactly the same image. But if you take a real image, it's generally not possible to get exactly the same image, but only a similar one.

The exact point in the video:

https://youtu.be/c-NJtV9Jvp0?t=208
Attractiveness is subjective, but most of the time, people find attractive the fact someone seems "open" for dates.
Beg to differ. Netflix has made some great local content, narcos, Dark, Casa de papel, The dutch civil war resistance miniseries, some great French comedies, and the list goes on.

I think it's great to see stuff not all coming out of Hollywood.
the court rules on cases involving the rules, not whether the regulator can make the rule surely
this is pretty cool, especially https://www.github.com/sethvincent/javascripting
PSD2 and Open Banking Bring About New Security Threats
Also, looks like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ has been updated to use the new generator.
The Effect of Background Music on Call Center Agents
Problem here is, if person #1 can do something, and gets away with it, then person #2 does that, and gets away with it, many more people will do the same.

Spending more on the crimes with negative ROI, makes the total ROI higher because it acts as a deterrent for future would-be criminals.

Reddit was full of video of really trashy kids, driving their bicycles through malls and stores harrassing random people there, and "nobody could do anything" about them. If those kids were arrasted, sent to juvie, given community service (or maybe even just shown on tv crying in court, instead of acting all badass on their bikes), that would sure stop many others from repeating what they did.
Isn't it also a bit more strictly defined in angelo saxon countries?

I had the impression, in Germany it's "research some stuff" and you are basically left on your own. Other countries had a real program, that was like a master program just more research related.
That would make sense if the app wasn't also terribly user unfriendly.
A bit off-topic - the license [0] is interesting. IIUC, if anyone who is using this code decides to sue NVidia, the grants are revoked, and they can sue back for copyright infringement?

Also, interesting that even with such "short" licences there are trivial mistakes in it (section 2.2 is missing, though it is referenced from 3.4 and 3.6 - I wonder what it was...)

[0] https://nvlabs.github.io/stylegan2/license.html
Lessons learned while building an LLVM based tool for Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD
Cool. But completely not a solution to affordable housing construction in rural areas.

What is the barrier to affordable housing construction in rural areas? Where I traveled in Uganda it was availability and affordability of materials and equipment. Cement was expensive as was corrugated roofing. Renting heavy equipment was expensive.

We had plentiful cheap unskilled labour, free bricks made from clay soil baked in the sun, lots of hand tools and a foreman with basic construction skills. Transportation was slow but not prohibitively expensive.

I hope this 3D printing technique is simply a way of waving a flag to draw attention to the need for better housing in these communities. There are many much better MVPs than an expensive machine using expensive materials operated by an expensive team.
That's why I think C and C++ need a OS-agnostic package manager.
Literally hiding under a blanket: the day blurring out houses becomes widespread, they will just sent a human to look at your house.
Geostationary satellite an alternative to monitor land surfaces
Googles algorithms should penalize them hard for that... but they probably wont. Random users clicking a reddit link in search results, and coming back after two seconds and clicking on another result, should bring their "site score" down.... but considering it's google .. and it's reddit.. it probably wont.
Slightly tangential. One thing I always wonder about, is there no dark matter around us, I mean here on earth?
Track and Visualize Flight Delays in Real Time
I'm not experiencing this on either desktop or mobile. I'm not a member of reddit so am not signed in. I can view comment threads and other content perfectly fine.
Having tried this, it's dodgy at best. Wifi at the waiting areas is rare, especially since they're often located pretty far out at the behest of taxi companies.

At McCarran (LAS) I ended up just splitting a taxi cash with another guy from the queue after Defcon. Though considering the taxi driver _insisted_ on taking me to my terminal (for another $7 since he had to leave the airport and re-enter) I was annoyed I couldn't review him.
You're taking an ill conditioned and personally owning the responsibility of building it back to market condition. Seems like you're relatively comfortable taking risks relative to the general population.

This doesn't seem less wrong than generalizing based on something like age or gender. I would attack it on privacy grounds, not accuracy.
What does it even mean? No accident happened it up to now means that the time is yet to come or that "prediction" is just bullshit?