skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Premature optimisation, to me, is spending days working out a new algorithm for 5% saving on something that looks inefficient to you but you haven't actually any idea if it's really a problem.

I've never met any of these engineers who think optimization is always wrong.
I have, but it doesn't work out or i haven't found adequate tools for my programmer's task. Most of the apps can't be full screen, fortunately there is dexmax app to fix this. Overall experience for some serious work is not good, but for surfing it's fine. I succesfully used rdp to connect to my desktop computer :)
Drag equations are "putting the cart before the horse". So many other issues with this scenario. Mainly the connection between vessels, but added cost, too. Could it be done? Of course. Would it be practical? Almost absolutely not.
I though the CIA wasn't using OPM - but your right for some use cases records should never be online.
> the strongest economic interest is in downplaying global warming, not overplaying it

The strongest economic interest might be for inaction (but let's not forget that economic costs are often human costs in the end).

On the other hand, as far as information goes, the pressure is towards overstating the risks of climate change: it publishes articles with catchy abstracts, it connects boring researches to a hot new topic, it gives newspapers strong headlines that pique the readers' interest, it gives millions of activists something to fight for.

The result is a mix of inaction and panic.
Even though it’s unlikely anyone will think it’s referring to millibits, there’s still a decent chance some will assume Mb (Megabits) due to the lowercase 'b' instead of the intended MB (Megabytes).
Oh my, this is literally my retirement plan.
Cross-Subsidies
There's a fantastic TED talk on the same topic called "Why work does not happen at work" by Jason Fried

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs
Did they check for the Hawthorne Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Almost any change you make when combined with extra observation will increase productivity for a short time.
> 1) How much can this system be manipulated/programmed to solve or "focus" on specific (or fuzzy) tasks?

There's a small subfield of ML called Reservoir Computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_computing

In RC the input is processed by a random network (the so called reservoir) followed by a small output layer.
I'm fairly confused as to how this is a "Show HN" to begin with — essentially this is just a README file which links to Kickstarter. No one in their sane mind will download and run a random closed-source binary that's supposedly "anonymous social network crypto hacker board thing totally safe".
Shorter and less meetings were mentioned.

Maybe they also included more efficient meetings, and teaching employees to not print stacks of paper to prepare or use in meetings anymore. Some details will be missing from the article.
I see that type of hyperbolic claim several times in the comments.

I wasn't just commenting on the abstract presented. I was commenting on the comments I see here, as well as comments I see related to similar papers all the time.

I also interact with AI/ML researchers all the time. Most of them are typically some combination of:
1. Poorly informed about the appropriate context and utility of medical imaging.
2. Trying as hard as they can to push AI/ML as the most important technology in medicine today.
3. Pursuing a very task-specific project which they claim is massively generalizable in some (incorrect) way.
In cases where you control the hardware and the problem is sufficiently parallelizable.

If you are releasing consumer applications either your program works smoothly on the device a consumer has or not, let alone has the ability to buy either financially or fundamentally (as in you don’t find a phone with desktop level performance anywhere, because they don’t simply exist).
less time wasted in meetings with printed presentations?
That was the official support from Google. Kotlin had been around for a long time before that. I used to write Android applications using it before Google officially supported it.
They're probably being forced into using email more because people will not all have the same free day so handing printed memo's and attached documents doesn't really work.
The space of "fairly typical materials" is very wide because there are lots of elements and their combinations blow up very fast. Secondly, materials are often very sensitive to small physical or chemical changes, resulting in wildly differing properties.

To you the simpleness of the final result is surprising, but that simple result was discovered after a long and exhaustive search. A search into a wide and shallow space can be just as impressive and difficult as a search into a narrow and deep space.
> Your developers only need to know one language/codebase

As one wise man said: make it easier for the users, harder for a database.
The same applies to developers. We tend to forget who we make products for.
If I was in that experiment I would work harder during that 80% just to prove that 80% time is more productive.
Writing that in your facebook/yearbook would probably be a disqualifier.
So... the big question is does each SWATing registry share across city (city PD), county (sheriff), state (several LEAs) and federally (many LEAs) so there’s coordination? And, if a location were gamed to get placed on a registry falsely, wouldn’t that be a good place to commit a crime where the police wouldn’t respond? Rather than lists of “go/no-go,” I think police on the beat need to utilize Good Judgement, and especially heightened caution when they’re gearing-up with flash-bangs, body armor and long rifles. Maybe SWATing registries should be used as ephemeral advisories rather than a definite preemptive, decision-maker.

PS: This seems like a good topic for Mike The Cop, Officer401 and/or DonutOperator to cover.
Unless it's some sort of C level meeting with tje board on quarterly basis, I seen no reason why any internal meeting should be more than half an hour long.
Batteries today are better than batteries 1, 2, 5 and 10 years ago. Lab results may not translate 1:1 into commercial applications, but they still provide the starting points for real improvements.
The original UNIX came with social networking tools: "mail" for sending messages to people, and "finger" for status updates. Later systems added "talk" and "ytalk" for live chat.
Because Americans are sleeping.
Try hugo ssg
Fahrvergnügen
Any specific courses that you'd recommend on LinkedIn Learning?
Sluggish webpages. Ever heard of them?
That's exactly the kind of application I had in mind :D
After seeing that link yesterday where you could buy Hackernews upvotes, posts like this one upvoted to the front page makes more sense.
Great idea, that might work. Thanks!
How do you account for n like in O(n)?
It's highly dependent on the actual work and the productivity claims here are unclear. There's plenty of evidence that truly creative/productive time per day is limited and that more but shorter days might be a better trade off then fewer long days. Then again it all gets muddied when full-time hours aren't actually tracked and certain cultures like Japan where excessive overtime is normal.
Elimination of "makework"? If you're trying to fill time by reviewing a document, it's better to print it off and go through it with a highlighter, spread pages across your desk etc. That achieves the goal of looking like work.
s6/s6-rc vs. systemd, or why you probably do not need systemd
5 Predictions for Bitcoin in 2020
The next main root comment. 'Of the major specialties, it seams that radiology is the most in danger of disruption'.

I wonder how long people think about these sorts of claims before posting them.

Do they really think an AI is more likely to appropriately interpret an MRI scan (and all the anatomic, physics and pathophysiological data therein contained) in the context of a specific clinical work-up more easily than triage patients the way a family practitioner or ER doctor does?
some good/top places at Silicon Valley make one day, Wednesday typically, a WFH and that is pretty close to 4-day week and may be even better as it allows to experience the "collaborative" environment of modern office plan in bite-size 2-day chunks instead of tiresome 4 days in a row thus being much more easier and less stressful which almost directly translates into productivity.
It certainly would be nice to see things move on from a standard established at a car manufacturer nearly a hundred years ago. However, it's a well-known result that almost every study of a change in an office finds an increase in productivity. Essentially, it's believed that any change temporarily increases motivation. (I can't find citations right now, sorry.)
Why was refcounting chosen? It seems to me it was only done because the designers were so used to C++ that they don't understand the drawbacks of not having it.
I've heard Japan still relies a lot on faxes rather than emails, and I wouldn't be surprised if a four-day workweek in the West at an average IT corporation would result in 50% fewer emails, as a lot of them are superfluous.

It seems like reducing work hours is the most effective way to combat climate change.
Did I miss something important about GraalVM? I thought it was another runtime on top of JVM, not a replacement for it. For a Java program, for example, GraalVM would presumably have no impact since it wouldn't be used for it.
Simple Tips to Get Through the Winter Cheaply
It seems to be a common pattern in the cryptocurrency world.

Which is mind-bogglingly stupid considering how devastating it can be to run untrusted, unreproducible binaries on machines hosting things like crypto clients/wallets.
The startup I work for does this, I work 4 days a week, get paid 5. I love it, makes such a huge difference to have a 3 days weekend, lets you detach a lot more from work.

I'm the CTO and have set up alerts that I get on my phone when I'm not in the office, so even if something critical happens over the weekend it's not like I won't fix it for 3 days.

I noticed that I'm more motivated during the 4 days to do a maximum of stuff, I take less smoking pauses during the day, which increases my productivity and is better for my health ;). I also have no problem to stay one or two hours longer on thursday evening if something needs to be done before the long weekend because I know I will have plenty of time to recover afterwards anyway.
Tomorrow I’ll be launching https://typehut.com, a super simple publishing platform for blogs, changelogs, newsletters, announcements, etc that I’ve been building during this last month.
Heavily discussed twice at time of announcement nearly 2 months ago (note this article is from early Nov):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433710

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441689
That does make sense and the only comparison I'm aware of would be a remote worker who you are just not going to start sending printed pages or faxes etc compared to digital forms, and in those case will often see closer to 100% reduction (alas some things need physical signatures).
Well, if they didn't you wouldn't be able to search in your inbox, among other things.
I use Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/), which is a cross platform infinitely nested list tool that has a ton of features.
It came to a full circle, lol. I reposted this article because of that tweet.

> But C++ is not exactly the first thing I reach for when something new springs to mind, or I want some data analysis done, or ... (even though C++ is excellent for running production data analysis jobs)

Me too. C++ is a pain in the ass (although I only touch that thing in my college day building simple A* AI). I always go to seeking libs in TS (my go-to language) or at least JS before consulting to other languages.

> I've found the same as John Carmack btw. Taking some component of a customer system, translating it to C++, can make a system that needed 10+ servers suddenly run a lot faster on a single server (meaning higher throughput AND lower latency, because in addition to the raw speed advantage of C++ there's so much you can do in C++ that's not really feasible in, say Python. For example, mmapping files)

I think it's just the nature of true compiled language that comes with a very minimum runtime. Multi steps compilation in Java and interpretation in JS or Python always need sacrifice. I have seen great devops engineers pulling hairs over kubernetes configuration issue happening just because a Java spring boot service needs an enormous memory just to initialize some runtime objects.

> And so a lot of people seem to feel the need to once again bring back all the discussion in absolutes of optimisation being useless, or the only thing that matters.

And then, I found Rust, which is a pretty nice language. It bridges that memory safety VS optimisation issue. Although the learning curve is pretty heavy on the syntax and the new paradigm it brought, it's pretty easy for me who is used to code in TypeScript. I'm just surprised at the minimum mention of Rust in that tweet.
When I read your comment, the main thing that came to my mind to explain my point about Brave was their Shield and Rewards features. That's what's top of mind for me.

I checked my Firefox window and realized that they have a Shield-like feature too. Oops.

To me, Firefox's main features are the underlying foundation, and the fact they are the main Chrome contender — the rest are nuances addressed to power-users. Containers. Frankly, it's too complex for a regular user [0] who, as you say, just click on what they have been used to clicking onto.

I'm having a hard time justifying my point further about Brave than by contradicting myself around the fact privacy alone is a weak selling point... Brave is all in on privacy, they have a really clear message about it, and regular users will understand better from their website that the browser natively blocks ads [1] and more importantly why e.g.:

> As a user, access to your web activity and data is sold to the highest bidder. Internet giants grow rich, while publishers go out of business. And the entire system is rife with ad fraud.

Comparatively, Firefox's homepage lacks details. The features are listed, but why are they useful to me... not sure. e.g.:

> Automatic privacy is here. Download Firefox to block over 2000 trackers.

> Firefox shows you how many data-collecting trackers are blocked with Enhanced Tracking Protection.

I understand both statements, but someone external to tech/ad tech will probably not see that as worth unless an expert explains why they should use that browser, exactly as you explained.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
[1] https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/files_2019-11-home/imag...
The free market will not solve this problem. Just look at all the major cities in the world; they all have a problem of gentrification and rising prices for housing.

Rent-seeking will always drive the prices to the barely-acceptable and thus will make it affordable for a large portion of the population. That portion is either driven to the periphery or denied housing altogether.

So no; housing will not automatically become affordable. There are forces in the market that prevent that.
How do you manage the browser bookmarks?
Well, the GP comments says 'don't hide them either' and I suppose it implies answering to the question about leaving previous job.

The first answer in your example is honest, the second one, while technically true, triggers my bullshit detector.
It's marketing hyperbole, no one really believes it's the absolute best-in-class.

The idea of this open source app from Google is to demonstrate a real world use case of porting legacy native code to the web via webassembly
Absolutely, that's an area where various software innovations could be extremely helpful.

In fact, the area of medicine most in need of 'disruption' imho is healthcare enterprise software. Doctors are literally killing themselves because the interfaces they have to deal with on a daily basis are so appallingly poor.

Of course, the solution is less technological than political as it wouldn't take much to come up with better software than the legacy alternatives but you'd have a very hard time getting past the entrenched relationship interests of crony bureaucrats that run hospital administrations.
Fairly certain that's a feature, not a bug. (Obviously to hide other features which the end users would take offense to)
What kind of site do you run that generates $1.5k/month in ad revenue? High traffic niche blog?
Nice discussion about storing bookmarks.
> there doesn't really seem like that big of an incentive to sell a "lie" that CO2 is fucking the climate.

The article we're commenting on argues there's been a huge pressure towards researching ways to stop beta amyloid plaques; and yet there's no obvious "incentive" to do so. It's just a catchy hot topic on which many have invested their careers.

In the case of climate change, you have to factor in both the scientific pressure, similar in everything to what's been described here; and the media pressure, absent in the alzheimer's case: the media absolutely loves to sell a scare story, and the climate change story is just the perfect one: it's everywhere, it's invisible, it carries an enormous amount of consequences and huge risks. Most of the predictions are decades away in the future, so the story can go on unchecked for decades. And so on.

I'm not saying climate change science is wrong (although some of it certainly is: "climate change science" goes from the basic physics of CO2 greenhouse effect to ecology, economy and social and political predictions far away in the future). I'm saying that you must factor in all the inevitable effects of a story everybody just loves to tell.
You have an odd definition of "new work". My copy of the first Xinu book is dated 1984, pre-dating the invention of the GNU General Public Licence by half a decade.
Has Swift improved their text handling? Last time I looked, it took way too many lines of code and temporary variables just to extract a substring range from a string. Their convoluted idea that a string can't be directly sliced with integer indexes–by bytes, let alone by Unicode code points or graphemes–was so frustrating I swore I would never look in Swift's general direction again. It was such a joke just to try to extract x UTF-8 characters starting from position y. I liked the overall feel of the language, but the fact I ran into such a horrible wall trying to perform the most basic of string manipulations was unforgivable.

Swift came out at a time where UTF-8 was already the standard. They talked a lot of talk about grapheme clusters being the most accurate representation, and then failed to deliver a coherent API to back it up. Any chance that has changed?
Good points, thanks for making them.
I'm speaking from experience in UK/Sweden vs what I see in The Netherlands.

In some of the large organizations I've worked at it was the culture to distribute anything "official" - draft documents, meeting notes, presentations for meetings etc - in printed forms to a surprisingly large number of people.

Since I moved to mainland Europe - where a four-day working week is very much the norm for people with kids in high skill jobs - I have yet to encounter this practice.

Technology might also be playing a roll here, but large organizations have this tendency to fight any kind of change tooth and nail, it only seems to happen when it is forced.
DoT comes up with CEIR lost mobile phones
Semi-related rambling:

Some hashing algorithms get broken, and we can never be sure whether a particular one is completely safe against attacks.

Now, to mitigate risks, one could use a composition of multiple hash functions, e.g. always apply SHA-1, then SHA-2 on data. Computation would be more expensive, but if one of the hashes gets cracked, data would still be safe as long as there at least one un-cracked hash function in the chain.

Do people actually do this?
This sentence got me:

> Instead of creating (or borrowing from Plan9) an “assembly language” with its own assembler, “C” compiler (but it’s not really C), and an entire “linker” (that’s not really a linker nor a link-editor but does a bunch of other stuff), it would have been much better to simply reuse what already exists.

"Simply reuse what already exists"...like the things that they reused, for example?
That's why he called it A pattern language. His main idea is to have one, not necessarily identical to the one he presented in the book.
Help Promote and Support Healthy Blood Sugar Levels
I wasn't just commenting on the abstract presented. I was commenting on the comments I see here, as well as comments I see related to similar papers all the time.

I also interact with AI/ML researchers all the time. Most of them are typically some combination of:
1. Poorly informed about the appropriate context and utility of medical imaging.
2. Trying as hard as they can to push AI/ML as the most important technology in medicine today.
3. Pursuing a very task-specific project which they claim is massively generalizable in some (incorrect) way.
To you premature optimization means spending days eking out 5%, but that's not how everyone sees it. Lots of people I've seen would also call e.g. spending 1 hour vs. 30 minutes on a solution that'd be (say) >= 3x faster "premature optimization" due to the fundamental design decisions (not micro-optimization).
Color Picker 1.0 Released
Military family here. My step-brother flies F/A-18’s in the Navy (not exactly the same spec as Marine Hornets but shares many parts), so that’s extra concerning. This is sad and understandable based on how the MIC works. Tens of trillions spent on crap; and chickenshit CO’s blame the victims (soldiers) and coverup incompetence and gross negligence rather than exhibiting leadership, taking responsibility and learning lessons. Don’t join up because your life isn’t worth a damn to pig generals, politicians and corporate schmucks.

PS: A roommate of mine in college was a Marine Herc Navigator MOS, for KC-130 and C-130. They would frequently get on the plane drunk from the night before but be expected to function. Squad meetings? At the bar, with mandatory alcohol. He bemoaned the V-22 Osprey as an overpriced death-trap, which it definitely was, in the beginning. I think many military cultures needs to strongly encourage less binge alcoholic consumption for operational effectiveness and because more personnel end up alcoholic, like my grandfather, for one (who was a paratrooper and later an AP (MP)).
We looked at both solutions, shorter days of lets say 6 hours or less days. For me personally fewer days is better, because I have a pretty long ride to work, so working a day less also removes two long travels.

Also in my opinion no solution reducing the amount of working hours should have disadvantages over the conventional 5 days / 40 hours weeks, or there will be no produtivity / motivation gain. So just saying we still work 40 hours but do this on 4 days a week is obviously bad. Also working 32 hours and being paid less is bad and so on...

Something else that had a huge impact for me, is that our working hours are much more flexible now. We have four so called "core hours" from 10 in the morning to 15 in the afternoon where everyone has to be in the office, the rest is flexible. So you are allowed to work 7 hours one day and 9 the next day. Also you can include two one hour pauses as long as the minimum amount per week is not lower than 32 hours. For me this is great because it allows me to drive to work and from work when the traffic on the streets is much lower than at peak times where all the other workers commute.