skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with the author's observation on efficiency and simplicity in modern software, I think that the article's tone is needlessly antagonistic. It read like a diatribe about all of us these terrible programmers screwing up software for him. Perhaps I am an exception, but so far the majority of programmers I've worked with were very conscious of their software's performance and worked hard on making it as fast as they could.

The problem is that when your software is built on top of a framework and/or uses X different web APIs etc then you often run into issues where a part of the system that you don't have control over causes performance issues and you don't have the expertise/time to profile it in order to fix it. So I think what's causing problems is that software has become a lot more about putting together frameworks, libraries and reusable components and when faced with such a complex system a programmer will often give up and say "there! it's as fast as I can make it without rewriting everything from scratch".

Therefore, the issue seems to be that programmers are building on top of other systems that they don't know enough about to use efficiently. The author does mention this issue in his article as well, but in a slightly derogatory fashion blaming programmers for bringing in dependencies they don't need.

I think if everybody had the time and ability to write everything from scratch like Jonathan Blow is doing with Jai then yes, things would be more efficient. It is far easier to profile and debug code you've written yourself. However, seeing how this isn't feasible for most projects, I think more focus should be put on better documentation of frameworks and libraries.
It’s a goal of mine to speak at a conference so that I can have a photograph of myself speaking at a conference for my LinkedIn profile.
Can you elaborate? I find it hard to believe that you can't build a REST API that's faster than GraphQL given all of the bells and whistles that GraphQL tacks on and that you could hand write the perfectly optimized REST endpoint. What am I missing?
> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/

Fascinating talk. Thanks for the link.
I don’t think the generation of adults that were allowed to be hit by teachers as kids are any kind of moral leadership in general.
I'm not sure in the accounting of the environmental costs of modern life that inefficient software counts for much. Doing totally pointless crap with highly efficient software might be worse.
So what's your point?

We as a society should screw more white kids because they're not being screwed as hard as the black kids?

Sounds like a good argument to have school resource officers nowhere if you ask me.
I assume you're being sarcastic. But, if not, that's a pretty bad reason.

I've been pretty critical with some other comments on this thread but I actually agree that naked self-promotion is not a good reason to give a conference talk.
Unity does have a lot of offices in different cities, maybe you're on to something.
> Python 2.7 will be forked in...

It already was: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/
Top PDFs and Papers Submitted to Hacker News in 2019
At least the "small" Window 10 still does have a text editor. The larger Android don't even has an text editor.
As the other commenters mention, talk to a lawyer. There’s a lot of specifics that they would know about, that even if we knew about, can’t help with. Possibly we can recommend some lawyers if you tell us where you’re at.
Governments around the world spend almost two trillion dollars a year on militaries. With only a tiny fraction of that you could blanket regions suspected of harboring Polio with para-dropped doctors. So much for the "knapsack" problem mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

But governments around the world care more about shaking big sticks at each other than eradicating polio.
The logo for Disney Animation before their movies is a clip of a few seconds of Steamboat Willie. I expect them to lean even more heavily on trademark protection once the copyright expires.

Besides, it's not like the copyright on the old theatrical shorts is that valuable. The real interesting stuff will be in the 2030s when the feature-length films start entering the public domain...of course by that point you probably won't be able to find any non-DRM video, if current trends continue.
Why? That’s just a name. If people are that reluctant to use a technology just because a murderer used to develop some parts of it, what would they think of current developers who renamed the project just to conceal that historical fact? Wouldn’t they initiate a grand purge once they learn that somethingelsefs is actually a project that uses code and ideas of reiserfs?
V8 would be one example. Some time ago, JavaScript crossed a performance threshold, which enabled people to start reimplementing a lot of desktop software as web applications. In the following years, algorithms for collaborative work were developed[0], which shifted the way we work with some of those applications, now always on-line.

That would be the meaningful software improvements I can think of. Curiously, the key enabler here seems to be performance - we had the capability to write web apps for a while, but JS was too slow to be useful.

--

[0] - They may or may not have been developed earlier, but I haven't seen them used in practice before the modern web.
Would be nice if you could write a small article about that.
1. Because every country's economy is not identical to Qatar's. Workers in many countries are more productive (in monetary value, for instance) compared to those in many other countries. Loosely, having workers that bring in more money would allow for needing fewer workers.

2. I don't have a strong opinion on UBI right now, but I don't see how Qatar's exploitative system somehow disqualifies UBI in general. Based on what you described, it doesn't even sound like a universal income: it's neither universal nor disposable income.
Ask HN: Best way to use tuition assistance
Many employers offer up to $5,250 per year in tuition reimbursement for tuition assistance.

I believe it has to be used to fund education related to your field of employment. Has anyone found good ways to utilize this (good CS courses or field-adjacent courses)?
I see the glut of bad talks (GP mentioned talks about talking about talking) as crowding out other, more valuable talks.

I’m not angry and don’t know if GP is, but it’s certainly worth pointing out and discouraging, if possible.

For me, it’s not that the talks aren’t valuable to some people. That’s neat. And the talk certainly helps the talker and their boss. I think it’s that the marginal value is low.
>Obviously, it was a genuine human error

i'm not sure what about that is obvious.

And even if we accept that this was human error, when the form you're signing says in big print multiple times that you can go to jail for filling it out wrong, maybe don't just skip that section? I understand that this is a hard situation for this guy, but simplifying this as "one checkmark" is pretty silly. His argument that he didn't check that box is beside the point - he signed his name to an inaccurate form, which still puts him in the situation of misrepresenting his identity.

The guy wasn't some refugee fleeing a country under exceptional circumstances, he was a well-off professional moving for work. there's no excuse for not hiring an immigration lawyer to make sure all the paperwork is absolutely perfect in addition to taking a huge amount of care and double checking everything.
Continuing development is continuing development ... support is answering questions on forums, responding to issues on github, community management, that sort of thing.
Is there a reason that this was considered problematic and not coincidental? It seems like an equally viable explanation to the situation is that the suspended students were problematic enough to warrant suspension. California has some of the strictest hiring standards for teachers in the country so it seems weird that it's just being assumed that the educators are the ones in the wrong here.
Respecting your abusers was much more prevalent.
China is very much in the same position the US was in at the turn of the 20th century: lots of territorial conflict with old powers, but a grudging recognition that the winds of change are in their favor. All it will take is a single small-scale conflict akin to the Spanish-American War and China will have unquestioned dominance over the South China Sea (like the US did with the Caribbean and South Pacific).

Their neighbors will be forced to play nice with them or be blockaded. Which is exactly what the US did in the early 1900s with central / south American banana republics. There is a playbook for ascendant superpowers, and China is just playing their best hand. Anyone who isn't a superpower is just going to have to accept what China does.
Windows users have commented at how Bash-My-AWS's innovative use of unix streams reminds them of PowerShell.

The listing functions output lines of tokens. The first token is the resource identifier. Piping that output into functions for that resource type results in the resource IDs only being used.

$ instances
i-03dfa28fc8235df7b t3.nano running prometheus 2019-12-31T14:10:45.000Z ap-southeast-2a vpc-9def06f8
i-0fd7a4c81051f2718 t3.nano running huginn 2019-12-31T14:10:44.000Z ap-southeast-2a vpc-9def06f8
i-0abcd6e9c302f35bb t3.nano running rails-demo 2019-12-31T14:10:47.000Z ap-southeast-2b vpc-9def06f8

$ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-capacity
rails-demo-AutoScalingGroup-14SBR6O3W1FBL 0 1 2

$ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-
asg-capacity asg-launch-configuration asg-processes_suspended asg-stack
asg-desired-size-set asg-max-size-set asg-resume asg-suspend
asg-instances asg-min-size-set asg-scaling-activities

$ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-desired-size-set 2
$ instances | grep rails-demo | instance-asg | asg-capacity
rails-demo-AutoScalingGroup-14SBR6O3W1FBL 0 2 2
In the world of international trade, only a stupid nation would do that. Systemic fear among the capital-holding class is usually unrelated to the fear of the state. Nevertheless, Nitzan and Bichler argue the ways in which capital uses its political arms to influence policy. One particularly obvious example is the strengthening of IP law, another is the military industry.

Political power and capital are intertwined, but neither is above the other in a direct hierarchical relationship, because both can hold a gun to each other's head. So long as the state keeps the right to property, and it almost always will, capital has nothing to fear.
Yep. I feel like most of HN's readership's asm education begins and ends with their 6502 class at uni.
In 2020 a cohort of US politically active people will die, retire or be replaced in significant roles. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is statistically likely. Saunders and McConnel likewise. This is influencing longer term politics because of obsession with 'legacy' such as the make up of the supreme court.

Putin is less likely to move on. There may be a new leadership in Iran but culturally it's unlikely to be more flexible, if anything it's going to be less flexible.

Europe already has it's new leaders. It probably won't be very different.

A politically resurgent youth vote will be coming into it's prime pissed off with current tax and social policy in housing and education. And of course climate.

The ww2 generation and it's successor will be dying out faster, but costing more in pension and health costs and contributing less in tax inputs.

Ubiquitous internet will be a given but more overtly a dual edged sword as tax and national borders continue to collide

No candidate for high office will have a blank sheet of high school pranks. Fifteen year old tweets will be held up to fresh air
> Teachers would retain the ability, under the proposed law, to suspend students from their classroom for disruptive behavior

That clears it up. At first reading it seems that teachers couldn't suspend a student if they are being disruptive, but that's not the case.

Thinking about some more I am not sure if this changes the equation much as I can imagine the teacher can reinterpret the "they disobeyed me" into a "they were being disruptive" situation in most cases.

Having chaperoned a few field trips for my kids' school and having dealt with students who are disruptive, I can sympathize with teachers trying to get a handle on one or two kids who just refuse to listen. It can ruin the environment for the rest of the class and take away precious learning time. Having said that I don't really have a solution. Not sure if assigning extra work or isolating them to a separate class would work.

> Black students made up 5.6% of California school enrollments in the last school year, but got hit with 15.6% of all 'willful defiance' suspensions

Interesting. Is it inherent systemic racism coming from teachers? Is that worth investigating more rather than just making the statistic go away by banning those types of suspensions. Something about that doesn't seem right.
We certainly did not need to have Police permanently stationed in the school.
That alone makes the point.
Our society is much more violent than in the past.
It starts at childhood age.
Lack of discipline leads to anarchy.
Well, Google Maps is its own story - it's like the app is being actively designed to be as useless as possible as a map - a means to navigate. The only supported workflow is search + turn-by-turn navigation, and everything else seems to be disincentivized on purpose.
I am not assuming that, I'm looking at the overwhelming historical data that polio was eradicated everywhere that became rich.
Invaders might not need to bring anything with them at all. Particularly relevant to your point, I'll share one of the military projects from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKcEwUcVBHs

More generally, the point I'm raising is symbolized in entirety by the Spartan faction's ideology in that narrative environment.
I've never seen spinlocks used in user mode. Is it common for game engines to use spinlocks?
I doubt that it lowers much.

You can easily pirate stuff anyway, but people choose to pay for good quality new content.
Anyone using openfaas widely?

Not gonna lie it breaks my brain in a inception sort of way. First we had bare metal, then cloud vm, then serverless, then back to own cloud on prem, then self hosted serverless...on a server

I mean I'm intrigued by openfaas....but what??
Why? He’ll probably be out next summer.
The "had to essentially work for the school doing e.g. grounds keeping and other tasks" seems problematic.
Do you mean computationally? Because I don't think that's a fair comparison.

If you mean UX, then fair enough.
Wow seems my numbers may be way off.
> So while the market, and general economy may not be healthy, I argued it isn't in a bubble either.

You're completely missing the point. You can make arguments either way. Hindsight is 20/20. You're making an educated guess based on data which is informative, but it's theoretically impossible to predict a Black Swan event. And even without a Black Swan event, your analysis could be wrong. It's not like all analysts agree on much (if anything) - so how do you decide who's right when nobody has a perfect track record? You're making the best guess you can and I respect your analysis, but I don't assume it's correct.

My point is simple: nobody knows for sure.
A single dropped can on the grass is a small impact. Everyone dropping their litter everywhere, because "a piece of litter doesn't matter" is a large impact.

I can deal with a 1 second delay to run a script. I can deal with a 20 second delay to launch a large program. I resent dealing with hundreds of 1 second lags every day for tasks which didn't used to have any lags ten years ago.
rachelbythebay.com
Last time I checked, the 2D features of Unreal were abandoned.
Godot and Unity have both very nice 2D features and I would say that 2D is simply more manageable for a small indie game by a single developer.
Well, when I was younger and in 1st grade, I had someone chasing me and throwing rocks at me. I ran up the nearest slide and stayed at the top and around the side wall where the rocks couldn't reach me. They came up with rocks in hand. I kicked them in the face and sent them back down. I got expelled, nothing happened to the other student, at all, except the bruise on their ass from when they hit the ground and a welt across their chin from where my foot impacted.

Sometimes we can do some rotten shit as children.
What did they do, and what lesson did suspending them from school teach them?
I found this article that goes in depth into kart cornering[0]. It talks about chassis flex and briefly mentions wheel hop.

I'm not a physics person either, but wheel hop seems to occur when the force overcomes friction between tire/track, causing an oscillation between grip/no grip. It is a lot worse on vehicles with suspension, because they have more give.

I find it easier to visualize with a car, because it is more pronounced. Although with a car it is usually occurs on a standing start, whereas with karts it is a lateral force thing.

This karting forum suggests high center of gravity contributes to wheel hop.[1]

[0] https://www.paradigmshiftracing.com/racing-basics/how-karts-...
[1] https://4cycle.com/karting/threads/wheel-hop.87876/
But no continuous systems are in the Chomsky hierarchy, right? Isn't that just support for my suggestion that cellular automata are by definition discrete?
Mutable state in the sense of database writes would be part of the network's output and just passed on to a regular db. Mutable state in the sense of variables that the application code uses while processing a request? Well LSTM networks can track state like that.

For session based variables? Not sure, either it all becomes stateless and the code has to read everything from storage for each reqeuest .... or maybe the lstm is able to model something like an entire user session and remember the stuff that the original app would have put in the session.

That Andrej Karpathy article that I linked to two comments above ... he pointed out, in a different blog post, that regular neural networks can approximate any pure function. Recurrent neural networks like the LSTM can approximate any computer program. It is because they can propagate state from step to step that allows them to do this.

As far as it being 100X slower, well at a certain point I will be willing to take your money :)
Newton's laws might be simple, but the best evidence that nature follows them is presented in Cavendish's hundred-page paper on weighing the Earth, and some very clever calculations by Lagrange that fitted least-squares planetary masses to orbital data.

The simple results take centre stage, but science usually requires a lot of complicated work behind the scenes to get them.
Thanks for the insights. You comment about VCS resonates with the workflow experience in data science. Jupyter notebooks aren't conducive to collaboration.

I'll have to check out Godot's note system, and it seems like when everything can be represented with the same thing, you have the ability to refactor your code as it resizes and scales.
How exactly does suspension teach children that what they did was wrong?
Nobody here is talking about the coming collapse. I predict the 2020s will be a decade of pain. Our environment and financial systems are on the brink.
I'm not sure that was the effect. The kids may have responded in the desired fashion after being struck by a ruler, but I bet they hardened their minds against that teacher. My parents hated the nuns who ran their schools like this and took every chance they got to undermine them, because of the ruler business.

Using size and power to rule children earns fear, not respect, and I think there are a lot of studies to back that up.
>Why? That’s just a name.

is it really that difficult to attempt empathy?

imagine being one of his kids, growing up to become a developer, and then having to work on code that intersects with reiserfs.
Other than it being open-source and light-weight, I liked the fundamental concepts more. Also, GDScript let's you iterate much faster than C# and is sufficient for most cases. If not, you can still switch to C# or any other language (there are bindings for quite a few now).
As someone that would be disciplined for doing work correctly and getting correct answers, I support this.

A handful of teachers would give really bad instructions. Like, commanding everyone how to round numbers incorrectly kind of bad. I can’t even wrap my head around it still.

I’d do the work as it’s supposed to be done. When my answers matched the book and nobody else’s did: I was accused of cheating & stealing the answer keys or disobedience & not following instruction.
> you're not going to sell many books by saying "think exactly as hard as you need to about the things you need to think about, make smart choices, pick relevant abstractions when you can, and choose the right tool for the job".

You're right. That's exactly what needs to be done but it will NEVER be perfect. There's always going to be some Yak shaving in all but the most pedestrian of projects.

Project managers might call it "unplanned work". They know it happens. Savvy ones accept it to some extent and realize that's a important part of how people build grit, experience and good judgement-- sometimes it takes a few hard knocks.
You can roughly divide the Chinese population into the well educated and the rest; the boundary of course is fluid. It doesn't mean the latter category isn't smart or doesn't have college education. It means that those people didn't know the kinds of freedom (speech, assembly, etc) that Westerners think are the pillars of democracy. They didn't live through or have memories of a China on the verge of having a beginnings of a real democracy in the 1980s before the massacre killed it. They didn't know there is a vast Internet outside China so tightly controlled by the government as to be unusable. They didn't know President Xi had been increasingly instituting "red" policies that were worryingly similar to the 1960s. Those are the people who had newly gained wealth and didn't know any better. They could very well equate material wealth with happiness without yet realizing anything more.
Yeah, this could be more pythonic for sure. Setter and getter methods are always a bit iffy in Python, usually their presence in a library doesn’t bode well.

They could make some of them work with the same syntax as dictionaries, which would be a good start.
So it's too early to tell. But if it does work, then that means under some conditions it can work. If it cannot work, then, there is little hope as their system is kind of handicapped to have a better chance than most.
>> This is not at all an obvious question

It is obvious in my mind. Vigilance is the only reason it's so close to eradication. Not completing the eradication risks enormous consequences. Not if, but when. The cost of eradication is thought to be in the billions of dollars. A pittance compared other government spending around the world.

I say just get it done so we dont have to deal with it any more. Unfortunately the plan seems to have some problems.
Beauty determines whether men romantically desire or dismiss high status women
It is a Chicken and Egg problem. Lots of the basic 5G infrastructure should be in places when they were testing Massive MIMO in 3GPP R13 /14. As far as I am aware ( not well versed in the US situation ), there were no new Sub 6Ghz Spectrum for 5G, so unless you are T-Mobile which refarm the whole 600Mhz for 5G, you are stuck with Refarming part of your 4G Spectrum at the expenses of current 4G users and capacity.

>The problem is you won't get as many people to read your article

I guess that is the biggest problem of all.