skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kids are dull so dull SO DULL.

It's not their fault. It's not personal. They've never done anything, they've had no experiences, their tastes are bland and repetitive because of their physical state and their limited experience, of course they're dull and uninteresting.

It's not their fault, but it's still the case. And they're not even like dull adults whom you can choose not to interact with (and even adults are often dull in a different way - some of them are hyper focused on something so niche that in that regard, in that niche, I'M the child with no experience and no understanding). Children seem to suck up so much of people's time and energy.

There was a post some time in which someone talked about how their small child got into MineCraft. Great, thought he. We can do this together. So they did. Building the exact same building every night, no deviations, just repetition. I suppose it's a more modern version of having to read the exact same storybook every night.
Have you tried reading the zines in this set? I love 'em.

Even as a greybeard, I learn the occasional bit, but what I really get out of them is a reminder of how amazing computers are. The author's excitement is contagious.

If I were in a physical office these days, I'd absolutely buy the boxed set to have around for junior engineers. I'm lucky in that when I started out, computers were orders of magnitude less complex. I got to grow along with them. But these days, there's so much of everything and in so many dimensions.

About 70% of my job with interns and juniors is just to tell them, "Yes, your feelings of overwhelming ignorance are reasonable, but let's instead focus on learning what you need to get to get the next thing shipped." Having fun, readable introductions to tools and concepts like this is a great way to make technology less overwhelming, so I'm all for it.
I still have the board somewhere, I will look it up when I get back.
>So, let me ask you, why should I care?

Because there are more things people should care about than things that can be proven axiomatically or measurement-wise that they should.
Do you like food? Or sex? Or being at a comfortable temperature? Because those are all programmed into you as an organism, too. Do you enjoy social status? Accomplishing goals? Material prosperity? Same deal. You are an organism and all of your root-level desires and goals are programmed into you by an evolutionary process of self-replicating genes and ideas. You’re not an immaterial ghost of rationality haunting a meat puppet that might hijack your life goals; you are the meat.
> I mean, it _is_ super awesome, but it also _sucks_ too.

Totally.

In my experience the inconvenience has changed pretty dramatically (for the better) as they've gotten older. Maybe it's just that I don't mind the new inconveniences as much as the old ones, but I do _not_ miss the diaper/toilet training/can't talk/can't get into the car themselves phase.
I meant C++. I'm using this currently in C++ production code. Has saved me tons of debugging.

What I meant was that if I'm going to look at a new language, I would expect it to support this type of functionality.

I suppose I can enhance the classes and overload the operators to automatically convert from cm to inches when doing mixed arithmetic. But this will quickly become insanely complicated when considering all possible permutations of arithmetic operators.
Unless your employer is foolish (unlikely) they have definitely talked to a lawyer about this already.

You should do so as well, to be on the same footing. This lets you negotiate with confidence, you'll understand your BATNA and the terms of your contract with the business.
Fully agree with you (from a 40 yo). I really love the term "technical debt", because it says exactly what it is, and can be communicated properly to management. As long as you have debt, you will keep paying for it until you pay it off. Very clear and precise, love it!

Refactoring a bit less, but it is also a very clear term so other people know what you are doing.
> You two

Who two? Every next comment was written by a different person.
I don't have kids.

However, I teach up to 18 hours a day with children of various ages. I've done this for 22 years.

I also have been the de facto babysitter for my family since I was 14. Kids in my home almost constantly.

The #1 thing I've learned is that kids love to help,
. If you are busy and shush them away then they'll cause havoc. Involve them ever so slightly and you can continue your task.

Realizing this was the biggest boon to my productivity that I've had in my life. Sometimes the kids can increase your output by utilizing their curious/helpful minds or attempting to apply your thoughts in their space.

I'm sure this would be different if it were my children, but I constantly see parents making the mistake of thinking that their thoughts/activities and mutually exclusive to their children's thoughts/activities. They're not.

It does take time to learn to engage and frame your thoughts/activities, but children are only a pure attention sucker if you treat them as a distraction.
A good topic to post a contentious viewpoint on:

This is simply an extension of the current "a company exists only to bring shareholders profit" viewpoint. Why resell returned purchases when it's cheaper to destroy them and claim a tax break on them?

Why sell robust toys, tools, clothing, etc. when it's cheaper to sell expensive pieces of "minimum viable product" that needs to be replaced every year.

Even when the cost is an unsustainable long-term business (not to mention long-term environmental and social impact), so long as the executives and shareholders profit from their short-term investment in the company they all shrug their shoulders and move on to the next ephemeral business.

Do you remember when you were regarded as a customer by a big brand - as an equal who had a relationship with that brand - instead of a consumer? It's been a long time for me.
The resources devoted to training don't really translate to the resources needed to run the trained model. A model trained on a thousand GPUS for a week might still run in real time on a single GPU once trained.

The restricted training resources are just part of the challenge. They point out that a human child can learn the necessary steps in minutes by watching someone else do it, so they wanted to see if anyone could make a computer learn it with relatively limited resources.
I often wonder about this in the context of musicians and actors. You would have to be a fool to pick such careers, as the prospects are so dim. Yet because of this dimness the selection pressure is very high on the pool of contenders. So our best actors and musicians are fool/geniuses.

Which implies the most innately talented potential musicians and actors are working at a hedge fund or Google DeepMind. And perhaps the odd personalities of musicians and actors is more to do with the bottlenecked selection than some relationship between talent and impulsivity: Only the egotistical and impulsive would step into such fray.

And so we are left not with the best but with the best of a bad lot!
Hi. I was a cofounder at Hack Reactor, an SF-based coding bootcamp that also provided the first set of curriculum and instructors for The Last Mile. I personally taught many bootcamp students in SF as well as inmates in San Quentin. Everything you're saying about bootcamps and the motives of people running programs like The Last Mile is total malarkey FYI.
I don't think there are any GCs that do not stop-the-world at some point, except those with special hardware support, are there? Even C4 requires in theory stopping individual threads, and in practice even has a global stop-the-world phase.
And the 50 lines of code you hurriedly typed in a flash of inspiration is also likely to not compile. Because it's a project that starts off very rough and requires work to shape it into what it needs to be.
It's not always delicate and perfect but you'll do fine. Consider how many other humans have done this successfully before you. Just do what you can without driving yourself and your co-parent(s) crazy and accept that your best might gracefully be a bit different than it used to be.
When my 4 year old comes and wakes me up to ask for breakfast, I can't just tell him to go away, even if I only went to bed 2 hours ago because I sometimes have trouble sleeping.

When he asks me to play with him it breaks my heart when I say no because I'm working. I work from home, so I need to maintain boundaries otherwise I'd always be playing with him.

I feel terrible that I resent him for waking me up early, and really have to work at reminding myself that I don't hold it against him and that I did get up and care for him, even when I didn't want to.

It breaks my heart to disappoint him, but I need to work or he doesn't eat. I also try to actually keep working hours so that I have time to spend with him.

Honestly, just meeting your childrens basic needs as well as you can is being a good parent. We can't be there all the time to do everything possible. We're human; we don't have the time or attention.

As for the chemical change mentioned, the only difference I've ever felt is I get much more sad when something bad happens to a child, but otherwise, I don't think I think I've changed much elsewise. My heart wasn't bursting with joy when either was born, not to say I wasn't happy.
What is the relevance of that part? Your claim that open source projects can't be sustainable is straightforwardly false, regardless of whether there are any Linux developers who are payed by other developers in order to use Linux-based software.

Similarly, your claim that "open source folks" don't value open source software as worth paying for is straightforwardly false, regardless of whether they pay out of their personal bank accounts or push their Fortune 500 employers to donate money and time (which every Fortune 500 calculates in terms of money).
I see this frequently on my 2019 15" MacBook Pro display. I can't capture these artifacts in a screenshot, and I can't replicate the problem (so far).
I have a 2 year old. I enjoy playing with and spending time with him, but after some amount of time I get bored, and the time becomes more tedious. If I spend an entire weekend day only spending time with him, I find myself growing resentful and doing things to just pass the time -- like driving him somewhere reasonably far away, just because driving seems more stimulating for me.

But if I carve out a couple of hours for myself and my hobbies, then I'm able to be more present and engaged and better enjoy the time I spend with my son, which I think makes for a better overall experience for both of us.

I also did not feel a sudden transformation when my son is born. It took about seven months for my wife and I to not feel like we had made a major mistake (note that women are also not necessarily transformed immediately, but that it is even less culturally acceptable for them to admit this.) But somewhere around 18 months that warm, protective feeling that pg described kicked in and I don't have any regrets now (but sometimes it's still boring).
Efficiency in terms of watts out from the medium divided by watts into the medium over a normal duty cycle.
> I've seen a lot of people fiddle with JVM settings without doing the controlled experiments

That's a problem with what the people are doing then, not the JVM. Furthermore, the new low latency JVM GCs only have 2-3 knobs to tune.

golang likes to pretend that complexity doesn't exist, and goes for the most simplistic approach, at the cost of things like throughput, code size, speed, code maintainability, etc. The JVM is suited for a much wider range of tasks.
Oh good! Being an expat, one pet peeve of mine is how people tend to freak out whenever I bring my axe to the office. With these, I can politely nudge them to rectify their cultural intolerance :)
A Man Who Invented a Surgery to Cure Himself
Supremely Unhelpful C++ Compiler (SUCC)
I would slightly rephrase to say you cannot truly take good care of your children unless you take good care of yourself.

It’s similar to the phrase “you can’t truly love somebody until you love yourself”
I think the problem I've had is that I'm around people who don't like change, which is most people. So I believe that things I invent are not useful to anyone but me.

I need to have better ways to get the word out.
That's totally backwards. The short version is that due to advances in manufacturing and metallurgy, there is no longer an advantage to scaling manufacture beyond a relatively small point. Economies of scale is not really a result of economic forces; it's dominated by engineering and other realities.

Look at how Alcoa revolutionized US manufacturing by making large numbers of small-scale rolling mills instead of large mills. Look at how the heavy press program[1] has fallen apart. Look at how large nuclear plants must now be made globally, because no single country can even come close to manufacturing the whole thing themselves.

Global manufacturing no longer has government investment driven towards the heavy presses required to create massive reactor vessels. Industries have figured out how to use welding, alloys, and smaller forgings to improve their products- both strength to weight and cost. Making big reactors nowadays is like an Apollo program, and subject to the same far higher one-off costs and inability to amortize.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
They had 60 million frames of video (about 277 hours, assuming 60fps) to show to the computer for it to learn how. I think a human player could pick it up in that time.
>First of all, I doubt it. Second, you just sound rather arrogant.

Oh, the irony.

"It really sounds like your code base simply wasn't too big after all"

"Again, it sounds like your projects were still rather young"
My understanding of what was types is that being a good parent doesn't mean you don't feel selfish.
I'll chime in and say it's a balance like everything else in life. If your kids instantly get your attention whenever they want they may have a pretty unrealistic expectation of the real world later when they aren't such a special snowflake.

It's tricky business though and varies by context (age, finances, relationships), and I doubt anyone really knows best. You can easily (and will) err on both sides.
I am not privy to internal discussions, but it seems to me if there is really lots of ongoing maintenance needed at every release, and not simply exaggerating the need for occasional patches and bug fixes, then it is worth some consideration of re-architecting the way the compatibility mode works.

eg. Maybe draw the boundary of where you thunk at a different place. Maybe do more translation in user mode as this wine project did. Or focus on binary compatibility with old, frozen-in-time frameworks instead of rebuilding them with every OS build. Obviously the specifics will vary with actual details of breakage. But from outside, it seems like these type of questions weren't pursued to their maximum extent, resulting in pain for the end user.
Just to clarify, as I myself was confused, this Fantasy Football is not American Football, but ... actual football which Americans refer to as soccer.
That would be against the letter of the challenge, not to mention the spirit. From the rules [1]:

> The submission must train a machine learning model without relying heavily on human domain knowledge. A manually specified policy may not be used as a component of this model. Likewise, the reward function may not be changed (shaped) based on manually engineered, hard-coded functions of the state. For example, though a learned hierarchical controller is permitted, meta-controllers may not choose between two policies based on a manually specified function of the state, such as whether the agent has a certain item in its inventory. Similarly, additional rewards for approaching tree-like objects are not permitted, but rewards for encountering novel states (“curiosity rewards”) are permitted.

[1] https://gitlab.aicrowd.com/minerl/minerl-resources/blob/mast...
Producing hydrogen using electricity and then convert it back.
This is disturbing on so many levels. I can't even begin to understand how disturbed one must be to be willing to do something like that.

A fair warning to those who haven't read the article yet but are planning to: Be warned that it contains very explicit elements, not for the feeble of heart.
No, Eckart Wintzen.

https://ex-tax.com/
Wouldn't "that, but with food", be the story of the Great Depression? AFAIR from history lessons, people would routinely destroy perfectly good crops and food shipments to keep the price high.
It doesn't matter. Because water is one of the most effective shields against radiation that you can possibly have. The effects are kept localised. Alpha to mm, Beta to cm, Gamma to 10s of m. To put things in perspective, you can take a swim in a spent fuel storage pond and be exposed to less radiation than outside it.

The contamination from fukushima is detectable all over the planet just like all modern steel is detectably contaminated from 1960s nuclear testing[1]. It doesn't make it any kind of threat to the environment. We're talking about the same order of magnitude concentrations that are used in radiocarbon dating.

And the very dangerous isotopes you speak of, they have a very short half-life.

See also, the Oklo natural nuclear reactor complete with all the associated waste/contamination and the fact that it had little to no impact on the surrounding environment[2].

At the end of the day, there are 11 known and god knows how many unknown nuclear reactors dumped into the sea, and things have turned out pretty okay. One of them is even a popular dive site.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
Maybe it was just chance, or maybe it was intentional. I'm ok with it regardless.

It's called oversteering. You sometimes do it when you've been on a crash course you're trying to get out of :)
The way the union regulations work out here, you may only work at a certain company if you belong to a certain union (a single organization). You can’t for example, choose between multiple competing unions or work without representation. I’ve heard this is different in other locations like Germany.

As a result, having a job at that company means you automatically adopt paying their fees, their organizational structure, the pay scale they’ve negotiated (often can turn into tenure-based, which is basically age-based), etc. This means you sort of have two management structures in a sense. Since unions participate politically and fund campaigns and such, you are automatically paying your salary to support political candidates you may disagree with, because union leadership makes the choice on how to spend the money it collects.

It can also lead to workplace inefficiency and frustrations that customers end up paying for. As an example, if you work at Boeing you may have some task you can finish immediately yourself (like screwing something in) but the union protects the job security of some people by saying that only those people may do certain tasks. As a result you might need to wait to coordinate with the screw guy to do something you could finish in 5 seconds.

Corruption is also common, although I cannot say how much exactly. One of the largest unions in the US is currently going through an embarrassing corruption scandal right now (https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-prosecutors-ask-uaw-mem...). There’s also a history of unions and the mafia working together (https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/), although it might be unfair to blame unions for this pattern as much as blaming the mob.
As someone who has wrestled a lot with the question of whether I ever want kids, I've sought out data. One thing I came across was this: https://www.salon.com/2017/05/09/google-confessional-your-se...

> Adults with children are 3.6 times more likely to tell Google they regret their decision than are adults without children.

I'd be curious if others have data on this. I'm especially interested in how many people have a reaction like Paul Graham (a switch flipped, it's inconvenient but totally worth it) vs. how many end up feeling overwhelmed and regretful. The latter thought carries far more stigma, so it might be harder to know how many people experience this.
There is a delicate, nebulous balance between modeling independent adult behavior and being a care giver. Every parent has to decide where that line is; it's constantly changing and difficult to evaluate. We live in an unprecedented time in humanity's history, the longitudinal research is still coming in, and everyone's making up the rules as we go along.
I can see a hybrid vehicle with both batteries and fuel cells as a future option however. I don't think we're doing to slay this problem with just one technology.
> If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids.

This is not a great advice. Those points only "sounds disastrous". It can be totally changed after you have kids.

As a developer, I always know I will be less productive etc. after having kids. On the other hand, I know I am not a genius, and I know I will be fulfilled more from my kids than from my lost productivity.

And then, you know what? When you get older, you will realize that losing productivity is unavoidable. It is so great to spend time with your family outside of work. Nobody can stay at 20s forever.

There is one more important factor: If you want to have a life without kids, you need to find a partner with the same mind set, which is not easy, or just stay alone.
...most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.

Paul's written a lot of smart stuff, but this might be the smartest.

I took a lot of steps to protect my freedom before getting engaged to my partner, and I realize now that was a shitty tradeoff. Freedom was an unexercised resource I had, which is to say it was largely wasted on me. I spent a lot of time being lonely - not alone, which implies by choice, but lonely - having no steadfast companionship and with no alternative to that.
When you are in a jet, you can sometimes see the contrails being formed near the wing tip. It's pretty obvious that its not something "being sprayed" and is actually fairly interesting to witness up close.
Tanaka explains their strategy pretty clearly here, and it’s about functioning in an entirely renewable energy context.

Hydrogen is better than batteries for longer term energy storage. To run a battery powered system twice as long, you need twice as much battery. To run a fuel cell twice as long, you need a bigger tank.

Japan is an energy insecure nation. Post Fukushima, Japanese companies are dealing with figuring out how to store energy from intermittent or interruptible supplies: not for hours but for weeks or months.

Hydrogen does that. It is a synthetic fuel that can be made from electricity and water. Fuel tanks scale well, and a large tank with thick walls can store a lot of hydrogen for quite a while.

So the strategy is anchored in a hydrogen energy architecture on a grid level. Mirai is a technology demonstrator for that. Critiques based on the current lack of hydrogen infrastructure are missing the point.
It's interesting that I've probably walked over some of those, and not realized what they were; I thought coal normally went into the cellar through grilles.

I assume it wasn't the same for such covers, but a lot of ironwork, specifically railings, in Cheltenham was removed for the (second world) War Effort. That apparently was never useful for anything other than propaganda/morale value. I've had the impression that must have been more than most places, judging by the remnant bases. It doubtless did less damage than more recent Planners.
Does the author know that the article is behind Medium’s paywall?

https://outline.com/BNreFw