skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have to be bluffing. I never heard of such internal research. How is even productivity measured in a context like this?
So you can find me a large barren field in a rainy region that was created by unsustainable agriculture?

On the contrary, life finds a way. unless an area is nearly 100% devoid of water you're going to find some life there, and if it's rainy, something will certainly be growing.
I'm not a psychology expert by any means but this reminds me of Adler's idea about the Superiority Complex [1] and how it's a defense mechanism for an Inferiority Complex. I think PG arrived at the same conclusion Andler did back in the 1920s.

I learned about it from the book "The Courage to be Disliked" that talks about these two things in a very approachable manner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_complex
The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing.

The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser as a competitive battleground; due to coordination problems only one programming language and UI model is possible, although another is creeping in via webassembly.

Then there's the ongoing War On Native Apps. Every platform holder would love to take the 30% cut of the profits and veto which applications can run on the platform. We're left with Windows (non-app-store) and sort of MacOS (although watch out for notarisation turning into a veto in the future). And sadly this has very real benefits in malware prevention. Systems which run arbitrary code get exploited.

Beyond that there's cryptocurrency, where finding a less-efficient algorithm is a design goal to maximise the energy wasted, in order to impose a global rate limit on "minting" virtual tokens.
What about Rust or D? OR even Go-lang?
I did about 10 surf road trips last summer in a concerted effort to really "get" it. To provide some context - and at the risk of sounding like a jackass - I typically take to a new physical activity pretty quickly. Surfing? Nope. THE toughest sport I've ever attempted. I felt I wasn't any better at the end of the summer from the beginning.

The thing is, I eventually just accepted enjoying the experience. There's zen out there in the surf, whether you're waiting for a wave or riding one. Cold, salty water on your face, in your hair, down your throat, it recharges the body & soul. It can be very social too. Which, if I had never tried, would've never known.

It's a welcome - even "needed" - break from the keyboard. And maybe just maybe while I'm splashing around out there, I'll eventually "get" it.
640 acres/square mile
There are different types of intelligence. Both fields require totally different talent, interests and skills. One is solving very abstract problems, the other is talking to people and learning a huge amount of information about how humans work.

I am good with abstract stuff, but in no way I could remember that amount of information about people as doctors too. I still have no idea what most of my bones or other things within me are named and I have zero interest in it. I can imagine one could be also the other way around. Have huge amount of interest in people, but despise techy knowledge.

In the end both doctors and it workers are so different from each other that they have so much trouble understanding one another. Remember doctors never asked for all this abstract shit. Also as you age you will get more set in the field you choose. That is just the way people work. Not an excuse or why one should not keep improving themselves.
The effects of exam scheduling on academic performance
His big bet is that the assets are undervalued...

Could end up exiting through the launch of a Music Royalties REIT. Liquid assets that trade always get a premium over illiquid limited partnerships. Could be an interesting asset class for diversification that's relatively uncorrelated...

Anyway, full investment prospectus for his fund is here:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5937f2f1bebafb1297678...
Introduction to Cryptocurrency (Course)
Think the killer point is making "synch managers" responsible for far fewer songs than traditional publishers.

They're effectively treating each song as an artist with its own manager, so naturally that manager is gonna be much better able to see how and where to place "their" songs.
401(k)s Have Reached Their Expiration Date
Yes, although if you can prove convincingly that it's a 100% safe change you can often get approval from someone who has approval power for most of the repository.

In practice, if you're changing 100+ individual callsites, then you would probably make a backwards-compatible change, then use an automated system to send out and manage a bunch of different commits to clean up call sites, then clean up your old function signature once all the commits are submitted. If your code isn't a really widely used library then you probably have fewer than 20 callsites, though, so it's nice to be able to do it in one commit.
PG defined haters as being obsessive and uncritical. By definition, someone who actually investigates is critical, therefore not a hater.
CES 2020 proved VR and AR are thriving – and moving into automobiles
Yes, but I ride only a few times and they drive thousands of times. Assuming the estimates are accurate on average, they will be fairly compensated overall, whereas I could have a very skewed result.
You're quite right that there's plenty to optimize. It's not that there isn't money in optimizing. It's that there's often not _enough_ money in optimizing to rise to the level of the top N priorities for a business.
Unfortunately this is not the case for a few reasons. The radio observatories in the US with visitor centers nearby have substantial problems with RFI among visitors. The receivers are extremely sensitive, shoddy electronics often emit outside their regulated spectrum, and the signal can be contaminated after it's been converted from the sky frequency to an intermediate frequency inside the electronics (often around 1 GHz) despite shielding. At Kitt Peak, observations with the VLBA station during the day are often nuked (esp. 2 GHz, "S Band"), and at the VLA many large programs aren't even scheduled when there will be many visitors. However this is known and acceptable because visitors are the lifeblood of the facility! It's a bit of a catch-22, because it means the facility is less functional, but it shows citizens why they should support the facility with their tax dollars and also support science in general.

For FAST, one must understand that this could not be smaller potatoes for the PRC, as big as it is. A hundred million dollars for a government project is a rounding error. However, the excellence of the design and it being the best in the world on some metrics has engaged the Chinese public in a huge way. Consider how popular space is with the public in the US and Europe, and that the PRC has not really had a world leading facility (Hubble, Keck/VLT, VLA, ALMA, etc.) to engage that latent interest. I have heard an anecdote from an astronomer that they have gotten so much bang for their bunk in this way, that the government may simply build a second one and keep the first for tourists!
> The flea market doesn't show different items at different prices to different people.

Does Amazon really do that?

> It also doesn't charge buyers a membership fee.

Neither does Amazon.
That is how people reason about it but we could argue it is the balance between who pays for the hardware and who pays for the software.

I.O.W., If you have a program with millions of users you make something that performs well enough for people to pay for it. While each cpu cycle wasted then becomes millions of cycles, you never get billed for those it doesn't matter to you.

I wonder if an eco system is possible where software providers have to pay for ALL resources consumed. It sounds ridiculous but having any transaction going on would make monetizing software a lot easier.

It would for the most part boil down to billing the end user for the data stored, the cpu cycles and the bandwidth consumed. A perfectly competitive vehicle. Want to invest in growing your user base? Pay part of their fees and undercut the competition.

It would make it more logical if they didn't own the device. The hardware can scale with usage. You just replace the desktop, console or phone with one better fit for their consumption.
When I saw Austen quote that PG post, I thought it read like a cleaned-up dignified version of Elizabeth Holmes' "This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.".

More context about the accusation about California regulations and Lambda: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1211717254712135680

tl;dr: 2 weeks ago, Sandofsky emailed the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education and asked for an update on Lambda School's license to operate. He was told that Lambda "does not have an active license or approval to operate", nor has Lambda "yet to apply for approval to operate as required by law" (see edit-2 below; turns out Lambda recently applied)

AFAIK, Austen has not specifically addressed this. Even though a vague, "We're still going through the process. We did [something] on [x date] and are waiting for the next step around [y date]" would be (initially) sufficient. Certainly better than channeling Elizabeth Holmes in the Lambda slack channel.

edit: just re-read the thread and saw that someone just replied (as of an hour ago) with purported screenshots of Austen's detailed explanation in the Lambda slack "in December":

https://twitter.com/SimulationBarbe/status/12160414151108075...

edit-2: Another reply from Sandofsky, saying BPPE followed up and said Lambda has recently applied: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1216075710818766848
In the last paragraph of his Principia Mathematica (maybe the most important book in the history of science?), Newton claims that sensation and action comes from electrical vibrations in the nerves. It took hundreds of years before before his hypothesis could be accepted.
\VR\AR News from 2013 to Today
So, sharks selling surboards. Not exactly PubMed though, is it?
That infrequent thing seems to be the worst. You can't really calculate years, you need to calculate hours. I think I have quite solid background in some sports, and I have tried to learn surfing now maybe 6-7 years. unfortunately there are no waves in my neck of woods, so it s only traveling surfing for me. Which makes it really seldom, and yes, you guessed righ, I absolutely suck at surfing. So bad that I have started thinking about giving up completely until/if I happen to relocate myself some place where I can train more regularly.
Interesting. At least in Norway its quite common in my experience for a driver to turn off the meter if they've made a wrong turn or similar obvious mistake that makes the trip go long, were the driver is clearly at fault.

I guess that means that the only way for a driver to give discounts, would be to pay the difference themselves, incurring tax on the discount?
I’m comparing Iran to other countries that can safely organise a funeral and don’t shoot down planes because they are ‘nervous’.

Yes Trump’s actions are deplorable, I agree.
> 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience)

I don't find this is particularly true of self-taught people. People who are raised in bad coding environments like working alone or, project-based consulting shops may have bad habits. Hint: the habits are not taught in school.
It’s not consistent. It mostly varies with levels of stress and anxiety, but there’s also a strong feedback loop.
This felt like a complex and veiled humblebrag.
I thought 18 carat just means 75% pure gold. If something has 10x less actual gold does that mean it is 1.8 carats?
Lisp programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing
My brother was diagnosed with PD in his early 30's (mid 50's now). He was on a bunch of drugs, but the one that really fucked him was Mirapex. Turns out, there are huge numbers of people whose lives have been ruined by it. It is also used for restless leg syndrome and you can find forums on the internet where spouses of people taking Mirapex will recount how their partners lots fortunes to gambling and other addictions.

My brother went from being pretty wealthy to homeless in 7 years.

His personality was greatly changed by the meds or PD. It's not clear, but the side effects of Mirapex are very clear. It is criminal that that drug is handed out like candy, without any discussion of the potential problems it creates.
Why do we need more computer power? I haven't upgraded my laptop since 2009 (well, I've replaced its HDD with an SSD 2 years ago and it made a huge difference) and I'm okay. Some people insist on photorealistic 3D graphics in the games they play, I agree that's cool but wouldn't say that's anything close to important.
One more data point: in Hungarian it's also common, also borrowed from English. It's spelled lúzer.
Depends. If it’s a spam classifier, yeah I agree. If it’s estimating causal models for some type of economic analysis it will be harder for a self taught SDE to compete with someone with academic research experience dealing with messier social sciencey economic data.
Ask HN: For memorising books, do you prefer a notepad or annotating the margins?
Which one have you found to be more effective when reading/memorising books? I've found that the notes I right are only effective as long as I'm engaged by the material.
VDSL needs its own NIC, as it operates very differently to ethernet. Recently I discovered that my telephone line was operating on one wire, but VDSL was still operating in a degraded fashion. Suffice to say this would totally prevent ethernet from working.

ADSL could only encapsulate ATM frames (hence using PPPoA), VDSL includes a new mode called PTM that can encapsulate ethernet frames. This may be what you were reading about.
> This is similar to doctors resisting keeping checklists

Or how they refused to wash their hands between morgue and delivery after Semmelweiss' discoveries.

Doctors see themselves as demigods. Not without reason, since other employees treat them as demigods, society and culture at large sees them as demigods as well.
I'm reading your combined posts as you having had mild anxiety that you weren't consciously aware of (aka high strung), and that the medication (partially?) addressed this without your realizing it.

That the effects were lasting (ie continued after you stopped taking the medication) just means the underlying causes were likely mental (ie conditioned or learned) as opposed to an inherent physical condition.

Good news! If you want it back just take stimulants - anxiety is one of the most prominent negative side effects of caffeine. (I'm only half joking here - most people will be familiar with the over-caffeinated and highly productive but difficult to work with coworker.)
The vast majority is not brought in from outside and was written in-house.
It would be a pita to control for time zones, or even culturally different lunch times and eating habits
Everything in Python is an object. In Python, containers are objects that reference other objects.

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html

https://docs.python.org/2.0/ref/objects.html
From experience, users who come to IT and simply demand we do something because 'reasons' usually aren't prioritized for follow up.

Managers who come to IT and demand we do something and show us how it affects their work/department and perhaps the rest of the business and offer to be part of the solution making process often get first class attention.

Could it be IT is blowing you off because of how you're delivering your complaint about SMS 2FA without regard for their existing workload?

They likely have more than enough on their plates as it is to simply do something because someone from a department said something about it, and IT doesn't exactly pivot on lithium battery, especially in hospitals. That doesn't mean they don't care about your issue or request, but like every other department they have objectives and goals that were likely set well before your 2FA conversation even began.
The impetus for the post was a few critical threads on Lambda School on Twitter.

I highly doubt any of this would’ve happened if the CEO had not spent a year relentlessly boasting about his company in a way that you’d expect a used car salesman to do. It was (and continues to be) too fantastical in a way that anyone who has worked in startups knows is rarely the case behind the scenes.

When you invite scrutiny upon yourself by being shameless seller in chief it’s your own doing, not because people suddenly decided they wanted to come out of the woodworks and bash your work.
I think it's worth looking at it like another product that you produce. I like to imagine someone seeing my code for the first time and trying to make sense of it.

Architecture: this is often documented with some kind of diagram. I personally find them to be unhelpful.

Flow: I'm guessing people aren't familiar with your UI. The best way to document would be to record a video, but that might be a little extra. I would make a powerpoint doc with screenshots to show the common flows.

For me, it kinda looks like this:

- Assume expertise in the individual technologies you've used

- If you picked the tech, then write why you did, and link to resources to learn more about it

- Write down which general constraints I placed on myself that might not be common. EX: naming patterns, cyclomatic complexity, using a functional approach, or being more point-free in a language where it's not common, choices around duplicate code

- Make a nested list of the folder structure and describe what each folder is for (even if it feels obvious), and describe how the different parts interact with each other. The questions to answer are: what are the high-level dependencies between dirs? Are there any cyclical dependencies?

- Find the knots (especially complex parts of the codebase) and make sure they're documented properly
What about redundancy? Every road can be closed for construction (or by an accident) and the city should keep functional with all the places still accessible and without other roads overwhelmed. Can a fungus take care about that?
It has 10x less mass, but is still 75% gold by mass.

It's effectively a gold aerogel that's been solidified to no longer be gelatinous.
As an aside there is also the testis-blood-barrier, although this is not quite as tight as the blood brain barrier.
There’s plenty, to the point asking this question is somewhat indicative you don’t really care.

Here’s an example from The NY Times a few weeks ago that topped HN.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

Data -> shell -> fund pipeline has been a thing for a decade now at the very least.
I have been working on web projects for the last ~15 years.
Completely agree. I've been to both Paris and Tokyo in the past year. In Paris we took extreme precautions with our belongings and we still got pickpocket attempts on the subway (fortunately none successful). In Tokyo of course we just took zero precautions because crime against tourists is virtually unheard-of (with the possible exception of Roppongi after dark, where the level of caution you need is still 1/10 that of any neighborhood of Paris.) I'm very sad about how stressed I felt on my last trip to Paris and how unfriendly it seems now. I'll probably never go back.
In very high offices it's fine I guess, since you want to absolutely maximize the time and energy they can spend on the work.

For more less ultra important offices it'a absolutely a problem, because they're not aware of common problems. You see this a lot in US governance pretty well, along the lines of "huh? I can afford health care just fine, so why are people complaining?", while it's a gigantic issue for many.
A pretty simple alternative is https://cuelang.org/
I think pop songs are a depreciating asset since new ones can be pumped out rather quickly like out of a factory.
Planet discoveries have historically gone to those who first laid eyes on it. I don’t see how this would be any different, and they should get to name it.
Now this is horror.
Result of not focussing on trust enough. Google is going to have more of this problem. Google really has a problem understanding the compound effects of trust and perception and dealing with it.
By now, they should have taken some concrete privacy enhancing steps which might be made for short-term but good for long term trust, as usage of GCP, G Suite, AR will depend a lot on their trust factor. Sundar is really coming off as weak in this regard.
That's close to my experiences in some areas, and it's really nice? Wonderful and diverse food, folks walking around, it's really nice.
Multi-core F18A technology, each of which is a simple 18 bit processor. IMO, anything less than 32 bits (with internal 33 x 33 = 65 bit multiply) falls into the primitive category abyss.

Moore is an incredible salesman, I'll give him that.
It is not racism or xenophobia to want to preserve what is good about a nation's culture, and limit the import of other nations' and culture's problems.

Could you please answer the following questions:

1. Is there a limit at which you believe mass migration into France would be undesirable?

2. If you believe that there is such a limit; what would a legitimate movement to argue for limiting mass migration look like, such that you would not be accusing them of xenophobia and racism? How would their arguments differ from core-questions'?
If anyone at home wants to discover new planets (without the need for a NASA internship) there has been a citizen science project running for several years [1]. It uses TESS data (I believe Kepler data was used before TESS) and is essentially the same as what the intern has done

I'm mystified why this story is getting spammed so far and wide? Is this a recruiting advert?

[1] https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-h...
Sorry, but you do not exist. Everybody knows that we need to have IP because otherwise nothing currently under copyright or patents would be produced.

(Sarcasm.)
> Cerner ultimately accepted a less generous offer from Amazon, in part because the company decided Amazon was more trustworthy on security, according to one of these people.

Well I don't know if even going with Amazon would be any better than going with Google since both of them will be prominent players in healthcare technology anytime soon. But it is more than clear that as Google obtains more health data via hospitals contracts, GCP customers, etc this helps their deep-learning systems learn more about you and despite releasing interesting papers about their achievements, they have closed up some of their methods which limits reproducible science and research.

Think very carefully about the sensitivity of this health data. Do we really want the likes of Google and Amazon analyzing this data for commercial purposes and later getting away with it? I neither trust that Amazon or Google will act in the best interests of whats good for healthcare, but I guess Cerner chose the lesser of two evils and went with a weaker devil.
The persistent unwillingness to engage and the inclination to dismiss was remarkable. Rachelbythebay had something somewhere about patches kept private and not submitted because no one wants to put up with an unreasonable or arrogant maintainer. All her observations apply here. Who would put up with the concentrated obnoxiousness?
You realise what you just did there right, without a hint of irony?
Results from a tiny SEO experiment (2019)