skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It teaches you to set things up so that the code doesn't have to do stack manipulations and other minutiae in the typical case. Most other languages seem to encourage modules with general APIs and hard boundaries so that the caller has to unpack/repack/rearrange the data as it enters and leaves. Forth very deliberately encourages developing a holistic system, and it discourages wholesale code reuse from other projects and systems, which gives you the power and flexibility to refactor relentlessly, until only the essence of the computational solution remains.

Forth is definitely a difficult language to work with, particularly in a professional environment where managing turnover is massively important. When I dive in to some Forth code that I've written, to make even the smallest of changes, my brain has to be fully engaged, and that's a non-starter in most environments (Chuck probably thinks this is a good thing; why are we making changes to code we don't understand?). But I am still an avid proponent of learning and applying the principles of Forth, because of the results that it makes possible. It is quite eye-opening to see directly how a system can become 10x as powerful, with 1/10th of the code, if you are willing to do the work and embrace the "minimalist" (I would call it "essentialist") mindset.
The cited paper doesn't attribute performance variation to silicon to silicon variation. Only the blog post does.
Whether or not this article controls properly for temperature, it introduced me to violin plots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_plot
I really think there's lost opportunity in the typical American master's program. Typically for a master of science you need to perform original research for your thesis, ostensibly to prepare you for the process of publication. But I think a master's could be a far more useful stepping stone between undergraduate academics and PHD or industry research if it were taken as an chance to have graduates reproduce important research. The grade will be based on the merits of the reproduction, which will be an excellent final introduction to research work, while also hugely benefiting the community by verifying previous research. Right now there simply isn't any incentive to reproduce anything but the biggest results.
- Investment Bankers get paid handsomely to reformat power-point slides and pitch decks

- Management Consultants get paid handsomely to clean spreadsheets and make nice charts

- Software Engineers get paid handsomely to copypaste a couple of lines of code here and there.

Lots of these people sacrificed their youth to get into the right school and work.

But still a lot of them are stuck with menial task for years and years.

In the end, you don't get paid because you're so damn smart - you get paid for your time, and the assurance that you won't fk up things.

A lot of the interesting work sadly doesn't come before years down the road, after you've proven yourself, and made it through the promotions.
My understanding is that GoodReads is one of the most gamed review sites on the Internet.

Amazon has a concept of Influencer Reviewers, but they should almost immediately recognize this as bs. I've never met anyone who actually cares about a general product critic. Amazon isn't niche, so even if there is, say, some guy who reviews protein powders on Amazon, and you're really into protein powders... The odds of you finding this person are low, and since Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person, and find more content about protein powders, nutrition, fitness, etc -- it makes no sense for you to follow this person on Amazon.

Certainly, there are some influencer reviewers with genuine followers. But this should be an exception to the rule.

GoodReads on the other hand is a place that lends itself to an influencer. So it's much more difficult to tell who's posting real reviews and who's posting bullshit that's being liked by bots and then added to the first review most people see, and then just getting liked a lot because it's first -- not because it's any good.

Further, GoodReads is actually like the 8th biggest social network in the world and one of the most heavily trafficked websites online. These influencers can actually get a lot of eyeballs, but GoodReads provides almost no way for influencers to make money -- like YouTube, Pinterest, or even Instagram do (most Instagram influencers post ads almost exclusively now).

So GoodReads influencers have to get more creative and extortive to make any money.

Further, this problem is compounded because people don't finish books they don't like. Everyone watches plenty of TV and movies they don't like throughout the year, so they rate these on IMDB or wherever. They like reviews that are bad. This happens much less frequently on GoodReads. If you're an influencer, you learn very quickly that any negative review is unlikely to make the front page. And if you're trying to grow your following, that's all you really care about. So you need to post a ton of 5 star reviews. Well, books take a long time to read. I highly doubt these influencers have time to rate and write a review and make a video about their review for a novel every or two or three a day. Yet, they do. So the majority of these have to be fake just based on obvious time constraints.
Very strange you have a new account railing on “deniers” in regards to a topic that even what should be moderate complexity experiments are failing to replicate let alone the amazingly difficult models in climate science.

It’s not helping whatever point you think you are making. Instead... consider the idea that WHAT IF climate models were failing reproducibility left and right along with the other sciences - should that mean a policy for a global tax model should be pushed as hard as it is?

You don’t have to be a “denier” to be skeptical of the course that the “true believers” are taking.

Some of us think the “climate religion” is a bad thing for a good cause. Long term counter productive.
> Tax rates decrease at the very top of the income spectrum because our tax codes make a deliberate choice to preferentially tax investments and capital gains.

Our tax codes were written by people working for the wealthy. Our tax codes make a deliberate choice for a reason.

> That's why almost every tax code in the developed world has that feature.

You mean the wealthy in the developed countries like preferential tax treatment?

> I don’t think you can just assume the only reason for that is the super wealthy having disproportionate political power.

They may not be the only reason, but they are the major reason. In a capitalistic society, political power is subservient to and works for those who have and control capital.

The tax code didn't write itself. Who do you think the tax code was created by? Who do you think the tax code was created for? The janitors and street vendors?
Yandex is Russian so will certainly keep you out of the way of the five eyes, provided you ensure decent encryption between you and their systems.

Russia is also famous for its cadre of crack Salisbury cathedral appreciators.
The article says:

'Australia’s attempt to put renewable electricity on the grid has sent electricity prices skyrocketing and resulted in increased blackouts. It has been said that intermittent electricity has “wrecked the grid” in Australia.'

whereas reality is somewhat more nuanced:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south...

'Hugh Saddler, the author of the monthly audit and an associate professor at the Australian National University, said wind and solar power supplied more than 50% of the electricity generated in South Australia for most months over the past two years. “That’s made electricity in SA the cheapest in the national electricity market and dramatically increased reliability.”'

To give an idea of the quality of the analysis from "Our Finite World", consider this post from 2017:

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/10/2017-the-year-when-the...

"Things could start falling apart badly in 2017, or alternatively, major problems may be delayed until 2018 or 2019."

or this post from 2015:

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/08/26/deflationary-collapse-...

"The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse."
"Zero passion 10am-4pm" doesn't necessarily describe not working hard. You can only do three to five hours of sustainable deep work a day unless you're a freak of nature. Usually anyone saying they do more just pads it out with breaks on Hacker News or Facebook, or has failed to automate the repetitive work in their job. A focused, organized engineer can pretty well exhaust their sustainable capacity plus do their overhead in 10am-4pm. As for zero passion, why do you need passion? And what does it have to do with not slacking?

Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.

The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.
Not just that, but also varitions in motherboard (chipset and anxilary chips), memory, timing crystals - many factors that are equally suspectable to micro-variations. WHich cumulativly, stack up.

Then there is that lovely gotcha that unless all your components are from the same batch, you may well see small changes in things like ancillary chips upon motherboards due to chip supplies being from multiple vendors or even vendor variation.

Many variables that widen the margin of error and would of been nice if they at least had one system in which they tested a few CPU's, to at least eliminate those extra variables. Ideally, look at the results they got, get the 5 slowest and 5 fastest CPU's based upon the results and retest those upon one system and compare the results. That would of been great and made the difference.
Whatever the solution is it's probably not in that book.
The point is Windows and BSD isn't doing "what he wants," because the benchmark in question isn't producing any meaningful data for two reasons. First, it's not even measuring what Malte said he was measuring. Second, the benchmark assumes a single threaded HW model, and optimizing for it would very likely slow down performance for modern real-world workloads.
From the abstract:

> We show that this variation is further magnified
under a hardware-enforced power constraint, potentially due to
the increase in number of cores, inconsistencies in the chip manufacturing process and their combined impact on processor’s energy
management functionality

and recommendations:

> • Characterizing node performance based on averaged performance distorts the true impact of manufacturing variation on
processors on the node and therefore should be avoided
And many people in ads are certainly not working that schedule, and discourage those around them from doing so since it slows everything down long term.
what if they're hard working + highly efficient?
On your first point, that is not quite correct. While the CO2 released will eventualy come back, it takes an enormous amount of time. It may be a cycle but what matters is the CO2 concentration in the athmosphere or more precisely the radiative forcing at a given time.
> With respect, how do you know?

Basic logic: if you know what you need, you don't look for someone to tell you what you need.

> Are you a priest or psychologist or psychic?

Would the answer to that question have any relevance to anything no matter what it was?

> So what?

I agree that that's generally the appropriate response to (especially unverifiable) anecdotes offered as evidence but...that's kind of the point, given the anecdote I was responding to.
The bar for publication (like much of our media) used to be far higher. Particularly with the push to get everyone through college, even at the cost of lowering standards, there's a sort of regression to the mean with respect to publication quality. It happens with any difficult, technical field that initially attracts the more capable in society.

Hell, look at what the internet was back when it was still mostly needs with passion.
Are you mixing up red vs blue? I think most people tend to assume that as ones income increases they’re less in favor of a tax system that decreases income inequality.
I can't help imagining an alternate history where a follower of Pythagoras stumbles across the mathematics underpinning universal computation. They or someone else creates a rudimentary programming language to fully express these ideas. Then Archimedes builds a mechanical computer to execute programs in that language. Perhaps Hero of Alexandria develops a steam-powered variant, and one of the successors of Alexander The Great puts the computer to use in warfare and conquers the world. Science is accelerated so that nuclear physics is discovered by the time Jesus is born...okay, enough for now.
The US would probably get a flood of extremely high quality applicants if they only fixed a few basic social services.
Even if land on Earth were infinite, there would still be differences in value based on location. Already there is desert land which can be used for free but urban land is far more valuable due to its proximity to desirable features.

Economic rent like this pops up even in human-made domains of potentially infinite expanse, such as the internet. There is no limit to the number of domain names which may exist yet some are far more valuable than those which can be claimed for low-to-no cost. Even social media platforms are valued to include the economic rent of their own user communities. For example, even if there came along a social media platform which was better than Facebook in every way, users would still value Facebook more because it has more community and community-generated activity and content.
20 years out of school still puts you retiring in your 40s ...
I would consider “ability to be evicted” to be a great moral wrong, and that access to comfortable housing that doesn’t cause an unreasonable commute to be a basic human right on par with free medical care & education.

It’s hard for me to think of a way to square this without a concept of land ownership and exclusive property rights.

I guess some type of lifelong lease from the government could be OK, but some land is more valuable than other land for living, so then how to allocate the best livable land?

At any rate, I do view the capability to be evicted as a moral wrong.
The whole, complex scientific field of metrology exists in order to make physical measurements anywhere on Earth comparable in a meaningful way. Trying to derive conclusions about the psychological traits of humans by observing n=200 of your local college students certainly seems... rather dubious.
I won't argue where the "best" sushi is, but have you tried shutoku honten? It's pretty great.
I have a pair of "identical" GPUs which have dramatically different performance. Swapping the order didn't help. It turns out it was because one was blowing hot air into the other. Sigh.
Two points:

1. I find the use of the word 'dehumanize' to be unnecessary and hyperbolic. This is commonly used to shut down opinions that concern some cohort of people. It is not precise or helpful, and is an appeal to emotion. I didn't state anywhere that homeless people aren't human. I did state that people need to live within their means, obey the laws, respect public spaces, and not be coddled by lax/unequal enforcement of laws. That's not dehumanizing, it is common sense. The proliferation of tents, trash, drug abuse, and property crime in Seattle is wholly unacceptable and the result of short-sighted governance. Pushing back on bad policy to protect my interests is not dehumanizing someone else - if anything, those who trash this otherwise beautiful city are dehumanizing its residents.

2. I addressed this specific survey that you linked to in my comment. The point in time survey is not rigorous. It does not verify the identities or past backgrounds of any respondents. It relies solely on their goodwill to answer truthfully. The homeless who respond have an incentive to lie about where they are from, because making it look like they are long-time local residents is more likely to result in public support for them. The volunteers who conduct these surveys are all either participants in the homeless industrial complex (see https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness) or are activists who ideologically support the homeless. These volunteers coach homeless to respond in ways that are favorable to the homeless themselves, to these organizations that constitute the homeless-industrial complex, and the ideologies of those same activists. The only data that would be acceptable regarding the origins of the homeless is strongly-verified/provable identification of respondents. Anything short of that is not rigorous and acceptable, and therefore it is not a myth to claim that the majority of homeless people in Seattle are transients from elsewhere.
> At this point the only entities large enough to make a difference are probably the NIH and NSF in the U.S. and the relevant EU funding agencies in Europe.

I m really not sure about that as the publishing bubble coincides with the rise in funding by public bodies [1]. Funding safe projects is a way to disperse funds to as many people as possible, and that's not necessarily good. At least in EU it feels that way. The politics of funding seem to naturally have gravitated to the current situation. I doubt the model of funding can change with the same stakeholders.

[1] https://phoenixrising.me/wp-content/uploads/NIH_Total-Fundin...
, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327917254/figure/fi...
True. And that's probably why she put it online.

Before it was too late.
Don't read too much into it. You can certainly find soul-crushing stuff in FAANG, but it doesn't mean that it's all that's available there. You might still have to deal with it as a stepping stone towards more interesting things in your career - but when you know that it's merely means to an end, not the thing you're going to be doing for decades to come, it's a very different story.
Show HN: I have been working away at improving compatibility
Alternatively, it’s difficult to get there from where we are today (effectively feudalism with security outsourced to the State).

There are lots of reasons great ideas may not take off, including the difficulty of grokking them and/or entrenched interests.
I think this is actually pretty foreign in a world where jeans & tshirt is seen as the default.

If you look at how everyone dresses though, you’ll find a clear flow from grunts (tshirts) to managers (shirts & slacks) to leadership (full suit).

Everyone is conditioned to that, so just by dressing differently people now perceive you as something different.

Of course there are exceptions, but it’s generic enough that I think it applies everywhere to some extend.
Coincidentally, this is similar to the lease-hold system in Hong Kong. Most land plots revert to the government after a 75 or 99 year lease term. You can sublet land during that period, but whoever directly holds the government lease is obligated to pay an annual tax equal to a percentage of the land's rated value.
And most famously: Windows
Current Googler here; my solution to staving off complacency has been constantly asking myself if there are other problems I can and will work on - and they don't have to be problems on your team. (Although, I will say that at a certain point, if you're growing, I think your responsibilities should be shifting from solving problems to identifying/prioritizing the problems.)

Every team has a looonnngggggg list of things that they want to do but can't because they don't have the people for it (even if they're not keeping track of it). Frankly there's also a non trivial amount of core language work that's done by people who don't actually work on any of those teams. Getting context can be hard sometimes, but I've done it plenty of times.

Am always happy to chat, my username is pretty obvious from my profile.
Damn. When I trip up on that kind of thing, I always just wonder at how absurd it is.

Two modern miracles. Insane complex and capable tech.

Simple. Hot. Air. Basics.

Oh well, maybe laugh. I would.
> If you saturate the information channels with enough misinformation it overwhelms people and they give up.

But that's the whole problem. As the replication crisis is currently demonstrating, some scientific fields are absolutely saturated with misinformation - or, should I say bullshit, under Frankfurt's definition[0]. There isn't any cabal with an agenda trying to confuse people (or at least I believe there isn't) - it's just regular scientists that are incentivized to care less about whether their papers are correct, and more about churning out a lot of them to acquire grants and propel their careers.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con... - tl;dr: bullshit is orthogonal to truths and lies; bullshitters don't care whether what they say is true or not - what matters is whether it serves their interests.
I worked as a software developer for companies all over the world: Brisbane, Sydney, San Francisco (working remotely from Moscow), The Hague (Netherlands), London then Berlin. The markets are very different in each country.

Moscow is the worst for developers but at least cost of living is low. I feel that Australia is similar to the US in terms of income but it's a less liquid market; low supply, low demand. But the low liquidity of market meant that if you were patient and negotiated well, you could score AUD $900 per day contracts (about $620 USD per day). The cost of living in Sydney is much lower than San Francisco though so I had a really good lifestyle and was still saving money.

In The Netherlands, it was difficult to find contracts above EUR 450 per day (about 500 USD). On the plus side, the government offered big tax cuts to foreigners so you ended up paying less tax than the locals. It felt like I had more disposable income.

London market was tough, it was difficult to find good contracts. I did see adverts for 600 GBP per day in software finance sector but it seemed like I needed personal connections to accesss those. Recruiters were always trying hard to pull me away from the contract market to a lower paid full time opportunity and I felt that I had less negotiating power in spite of having more experience than when I was living in Australia and Netherlands.

Berlin for me was not that great but difficult to say. I moved there because I had already agreed with the company and it was a long term career move. I worked there for 2 years and quit recently. The job market is difficult because they don't usually show salaries or rates on the adverts... This means that companies have more negotiating power and don't care that much about attracting top software engineering talent.

From my experience, countries which pay software developers the most have the best software developers and you can see it in the final products - The experience of using online banking in different countries was interesting.
It may well be some kind of law that every positive incentive creates at least one perverse incentive, but that doesn't mean positive incentives don't work or aren't worth trying.
I highly recommend taking a look at Zig[0]. It's coming along quite nicely, and has a quite unique take on systems programming.

[0] https://ziglang.org/
That depends on how critical you are. Our current incentive structure is out of control across the board and everything is skewing towards maximizing ROI in about every aspect of life money is involved in.

I apply this perspective to everything I see ("how are they getting money from this?") then work backwards and it seems to lead to accurate predictions, at least anecdotally. Perhaps I'm just jaded and cynical but it works well, unfortunately.