skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Out of 100 people who call themselves autodidact CS people, how many are like the ones you describe, who spend years to work their way through CS theory books to the extent that would be required by passing exams with good grades?

Admittedly I've only personally met order dozens of them or so in the course of a decades long career, which is why I try to snap them up when I find them. I said it's a powerful signal, not that it's common or even an advisable path for those with alternatives.

> My CS education did have a lot of difficult math that I enjoyed but in a running-a-marathon way, not in an eat-a-piece-of-cake way.

Makes sense to me, I enjoy it in a hitting-a-new-max-lift kind of way, which I imagine is pretty similar. I prefer to associate with people who, degree or otherwise, derive joy from improving themselves both mentally and physically.

> And it's not just calculus and analysis, but also graph theory, complexity theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, complex numbers, formal languages and automata, information theory, theory of compression and encryption algorithms, signal processing like Fourier theory, control theory, optimization and machine learning, and various other things you learn here and there, such as Petri nets, quaternions etc.

The predicate calculus[1] plus analysis is sufficient for effective study of every sub-discipline you list. Obviously I assume proficiency in algebra as a prerequisite of analysis. Complex numbers and quaternions become far less intimidating when you realize they're just 2 or 4 dimensional state spaces, which are trivial in scale and potential complexity compared to what any computing scientist deals with.

> And also, outside of extraordinary life circumstances, why not get admitted to a university anyway, if you're so enthusiastic about all this theory stuff that you'd learn it to good-grade level just by your own motivation anyway? For example in Germany, university is free and if you prefer you can even skip all the lectures if you don't think they give you value and just take the exams, while studying in your preferred autodidactic fashion.

Deutschland ist doch voll geil, aber die meisten von uns wohnen nicht da.

> My default assumption, unless convinced otherwise by evidence, is that self-taught devs can put together functioning code and have familiarity with CS terminology but only a vague folk understanding of the details.

Funny, that's my default assumption for all CS grads who have a degree from anywhere other than continental Europe (including Russia) or one of the most elite US or UK programs. I had to stop asking "write a binary search on the whiteboard" as an interview question because after five tries nobody managed it correctly and they all had degrees from good CS programs.

[1] I assume you are German and CS programs in Western Europe are generally, especially with respect to theoretical rigor, superior to most in the USA, so perhaps you'll understand that I mean "predicate calculus" in the sense that Dijkstra and Scholten used in the tradition of Leibniz.
1. Many people rent, and have never seen a property tax bill, despite paying it indirectly via their landlord.

2. It's not the same thing. You can choose how extravagant a house to live in relative to your total wealth and your income to make sure that you can cover the property tax bill while still meeting your saving goals.

An "everything else" wealth tax, (by definition) doesn't allow you to do that. Your control over how aggressively you want to save or spend is greatly reduced by an overall wealth tax.
Forest management will go down into one of the biggest failures of our generation. Combine that with a adverse climate and arsonist, and it’s going to be an awful next few decades.
>>Is it possible that the amount of planning and self-discipline required is maybe what is sometimes neither practical nor maintainable, depending on the individual?

In my personal endeavors I've found that the amount of self-discipline something requires is inversely proportional to how motivated I am to achieve the end result. If I'm being required or forced by an external circumstance, I end up needing enormous amounts of self-discipline. But if I really want it (as in, if I'm internally motivated) then all I need to do is resist the occasional temptation to veer off the path, so to speak.
Is it possible for our consciousness to leave our body?
I agree that many programs/departments need more funding, but the places with the most money seem to be doing the worst. It seems like more money is only part of the problem.

I think if they showed better efficiency and results, the public would be much more inclined to contribute. There's a lot of cynicism from witnessing so much waste and mismanagement.
Honestly if this latest attempt of moderation fails I don't see an option other than quitting. This period has held up decently well so far though.
What a weasel-worded title!

Better title: "In some places, some people say some things"
I don't think we should let politicians sneak this through unless we're confident that the public actually understands what is being proposed.

We shouldn't let politicians sneak this through regardless of what the public understands. Taxation is theft.
We were able to work with the local county sheriff, as well as social services, to get him forced into a hospital due to him being a danger to himself. In Ohio, where he was located, this is called a pink-slip law.

He was forced to go to a hospital, where he went into a brief 72 hour coma while he was withdrawing from alcohol. From there, he was hospitalized for another 7 days, and then forced to transfer to a physical rehabilitation center, as he was unable to walk under his own power.

Once he was at the facility, he was no longer under a required hold. Once he realized this, he promptly left so he could go home and start drinking again.

We spoke with lawyers about whether or not I could be granted conservatorship over him, as he went through this detox / early recovery period. Because he hadn't lost his mental faculties in any way, we were advised that a judge was unlikely to provide conservatorship to me, and it would be an expensive and damaging process. Our best bet was to convince him at a personal level, which is what we attempted.

Should people be allowed to drink themselves to death? Should families be powerless to help a family member with a disease that makes is so addictive, they can no longer make rational choices in relation to that substance?

It's clearly a philosophical question, and it comes down to your views on personal liberty, and whether someone suffering from deep addiction is still capable of making informed decisions.

I, personally, believe that conservatorship laws are a reasonable approach to helping people get over the initial hump of detox and then understanding their addiction. I want people to have a fighting chance to come back from the brink, and we lacked the legal right to do so, in this case.
The article does not support your conclusion. It may be that you just have to press the pedal more to get a given amount of torque.
Just because they haven't figured out how to back out the pseudorandom variations to your blood pressure doesn't mean it will never happen. And getting these devices into people's hands is the first step in that direction. At some point, we'll be able to take data from continuous blood pressure readings (regardless of arm position) and reference them against time of day, heart rate, activity level, accelerometer readings, diet, etc. And on the other side, we'll have an idea of, not just your blood pressure at rest (which has the virtue of being consistent but isn't the best predictor of heart attack risk), but your blood pressure during daily activity and intense exercise.

Complaining because we're only part of the way there is counterproductive.
Good point, I was only thinking of the "driving while impaired" vector.
Apple pushes recycling with robot, but mined metals still needed
Interesting topic. Thanks for the mention.
> No one wanted people to die, it is not murder, at worst it is involuntary manslaughter
>

Try again - more like criminal negligence at a minimum.

> But is it the solution? Is it what should be done?

Yes - there needs to be some serious consequences, not the usual typical 'Company shuts down, execs get huge severance while whistleblowers and investors get shafted' type thing.

Also, some heads at the FAA need to roll. Utter failure of an agency that's supposed to protect the public.

And I also hope the victims' families also sue for pain and suffering, because they're victims of this too.
Of course. It's condescending to think otherwise, you can't pretend youtube or twitter doesn't exist (especially with a substantial portion who use VPN to evade censorship anyways), it's just accepted as a fact of life.
Pretty sure much of the existing state and local tax base is already funded by a wealth tax called property taxes. I agree implementation gets harder when you get into more escoteric assets like art.
I would call Godot/Unity/GameMaker an engine-IDE.

You can have an engine like Love or pygame where the engine is literally just a shared object or dll and you need to basically supply your own tools for level design, programming, etc.

Engine-IDEs are one-stop-shops with nearly everything you could need built in (level editor, code editor, particle effect sandbox, etc.).
Exactly: the combination of size and proximity to populated areas makes this unusual. Unbelievably there was a bushfire in 1974/75 Central Australia which consumed ~117M hectares yet went UNNOTICED until after it burned out.
There was a follow up by the VT Governor on this. He instructed the DMV to stop the practice for at least private investigators.

Federal law requires some of this information be for sale to insurance companies, trucking companies, others.

https://vtdigger.org/2019/12/06/scott-tells-dmv-to-stop-givi...
There are dozens at the Architecture of Open Source Applications ebook/site: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

As someone who only really gets exposure to web tech, it was fascinating how other types of software is architected, too.
I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific policies proactively so that it doesn't find itself in the same position it found itself in 2016, as it reacted to candidates and third parties using the platform in ways that hadn't been anticipated.

If Bosworth is calling for an "internal debate over whether we should have a free and fair election in the U.S.", it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms, radio and television studios all across the country. Every new media offends the old. Newspapers were offended by radio. Radio was offended by television. Now they're all ganging up on Facebook.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10111288357877121
I'm very curious how many of those insisting on the strict definition also pronounce .gif as GIFF, despite the creator clearly insisting it's JIFF.

Words change. The coiner has no more real authority over them than anyone else.
Stealing this take from David Steen:

> Sad and tragic.

> Incidentally, this is also how many animals that cats are estimated to kill in the United States each year.
Not sure why downvoted, maybe a bit harsh...but this is the absolute truth. I'd argue that exercise itself doesn't even play a huge role, though it does help. Eat less calories until you start losing weight. I understand there are mental hurdles to this simple mantra, but its truth is unchanged.
Ask HN: Which Companies provide devs subscriptions to Safari Books or similar?
I have curiosity to know if a company providing developers with corporate/business accounts to Safari Books Online is common? I think it would be a great benefit to have.
Google's annual diversity report shows that Asian+ representation in Tech has gone from 38.6% in 2014 to 51.8% in 2018. (Note: this includes both mainland Chinese and other Asians.)

https://diversity.google/annual-report/

In my personal opinion, it has become more common for me to see groups of software engineers informally discuss an issue (say, at someone's desk, or walking down the hallway) entirely in Mandarin instead of English.
Raising the cost to drive isn't going to make people stop driving unless they have good alternatives, you're just making their life more expensive. Most of the cars on the road are people going somewhere they need to go. Transit in the SF bay is pretty expensive and also not super viable for getting around, at least currently.

It's a short walk to a local Caltrain station for me and I can take it almost directly to my official desk in San Francisco, but doing so takes ~2hrs and costs me ~$10 one-way. Barely competitive (cost-wise) with driving a car and considerably slower than driving. Time is money, so the idea of throwing away 2 hrs/day of my life and not saving money vs driving is not especially compelling and I can't blame people w/2-3 jobs for hopping in their car if it's the best choice. (I work from home instead, but most people don't have that option)

I think the (one-off) example from the article is interesting because it shows that if you lower transit costs, usage does go up and traffic improves. Improved traffic means that the people who do drive will be spending less time on the road, which means burning less gas - less money spent on gas and less climate impact.

Incidentally we do have some toll roads in the area, which I guess does have your intended effect because nobody wants to use them? They just use other roads instead.

We can certainly reshape cities, but "quickly" in that context would be decades, and in that time period people will be miserable and will end up homeless or worse.
@dang, I'm curious: why is analysis and clear explanation of a pricing change considered a dupe of a sugarcoated company announcement that buries the lede?

It runs contrary to a fairly common occurence on HN, where a piece of news is on the front page, and then analysis of that news is on the front page subsequently. For example:

Mandrill's official announcement post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713

Analysis allowed on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328631
How about four days in Nepal for a wedding, from California, because "status"
Wouldn't you prefer _longer_ vacations? With shorter vacations you're incurring the carbon cost for flights for less value. Unless that's what you were implying.
Iran's downing of Ukrainian airliner invokes an uncomfortable past
I like you, you’re funny.

A pleasant experience at the DMV... hahaha!
If you can afford to move
Sounds relaxing... wish I could relax.
So Zstd won't run/build on Solaris or AmigaOS?

Solaris 10 as in the last one from Sun (Damn Oracle...) is an interesting choice. Does openindiana not run well on the old hardware?
The devil is in the amazingly unlikely assumption that you have literally anything to offer him on this topic.
Of course. I started commenting before the merge, but posted after it, and didn't want this comment to be orphaned. Re-posted in the "correct" thread, and left this comment for traceability only.
if Google or apple had an S in their name you would have seen more of it
I don't know why that other post is dead. Having a "sport" mode that changes the acceleration profile for those few times when people really want it seems like a no-brainer solution here. It's entirely a software fix, and something people are already familiar with in cars.

This should be a non-issue.
>$10-$12.50 an hour

The minimum wage in California (the subject of the OP) for companies with more than 25 employees is $13.00. I know you were trying to be conservative in your estimate and I don't know if that $10-20 range you're referencing is for California, the USA, or all Uber drivers. Maybe the real average is higher than that, but it's wrong to present $10-12 as a "perfectly normal" wage for workers in California.
It's unclear if a Federal law dictating what states can do with information would even be constitutional. This is not a power enumerated to the Federal government in the Constitution.
Why ST Micro's New Lora SoC Is a Such a Big Deal for the IoT
I know it is not a popular view but I think WWII was a major mistake

It's a plenty popular idea, but people won't say so publicly because of social pressure: The Greatest Generation, The Good War, etc.
That's not what a weasel word is. Weasel words are things like "potentially" and "possibly" that you can put into otherwise declaratory statements so that when you're shown to be wrong you can fall back on "well I said possibly!" or similar.
nope...clear most millennials will be worse off than parents into middle age.
Same deal with Stanford SCPD, where I've taken a handful of classes. That was the key differentiator for me versus "pure" online offerings: since you're taking the exact same classes at the exact same time as full-time on-campus students, you have some guarantee of quality/rigor.
What percentage of people lose the weight they want and actually keep it off? Without that data we have no way to know how effective it is.
I think there’s some sort of underlying social experiment here
You say that wealth accumulation poses a (vague, potential, in the future) threat to overall freedom and liberty... but arbitrary wealth redistribution poses an immediate, obvious threat to overall freedom and liberty _right now_.
Letting the people keep the money they earned on the backs of others, you mean. Because that's what is needed to hoard the enormous concentrations amounts of wealth that are proposed for higher taxation.
That assumes either Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan would have remained stable enough to matter as world powers. Either or both could just as well have collapsed from within.
I am also a dev in The Netherlands, while a lot of data is available for devs in the US I can't find something similar for NL. What would you consider a competitive pay for devs in NL? (Assuming we are talking about the Amsterdam area for the junior, medior resp. senior levels)?
Florida made $77 million in 2017 alone in selling its DMV data to bill collectors, data brokers, marketing firms, and insurance companies.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90376510/floridas-dmv-is-selling...
I'm pretty convinced that the most important thing you can do for your career after achieving basic technical competence is to be more attractive, both physically and socially.

The reality is that you're going to have an easier time making connections and getting access to opportunities if you're well-mannered, sociable, and attractive.
> Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs?

Nobody is advocating overthrowing Xi Jinping. But if you're in America, benefiting from the freedoms afforded to Americans (and their fruits), it's fair to ask you don't undermine those values at home or abroad.
Relevant blog and discussion:

https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826680
Right. And moving between cities is easier than moving between states which is easier than moving between countries.

So the more local the policies the lower the barrier to choose them.
Honestly I'm not so into async and more into Lambda with Flask. Here's what I'm using right now for that: https://spiegelmock.com/2020/01/04/python-2020-modern-best-p...
What's the cutoff for a "very rich" person when it comes to these taxes?
> I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this

thankfully for you, you live in a place where you can't be put in prison for expressing an unpopular idea.
The article specifies payroll positions. I don't know what that means exactly, but I assume it would discount sharing-economy jobs (are we still calling them that?).
>Around the same time the bot campaign hit its crescendo, news stories about the wildfires also touted a police report in hard-hit New South Wales, where authorities recently announced that they have taken legal action against more than 180 people for fire-related offenses.

Believe it or not, it's actually the other way around. People committed and were arrested for the arson before bot campaigns started spreading the narrative that arson had been committed. Between this and the Gizmodo article, it's confusing why news sites are trying to obfuscate the objective fact that people were charged with arson. Who wins here?

The gizmodo article, which was even more egregious and got completely ripped on social media: https://earther.gizmodo.com/its-not-arson-you-absolute-fucki...

"It's not arson, you absolute fucking morons"
I cloned the repository for the site. Over-the-wire, though, I do get around 227 KB.
The grandparent comment didn't mention vegetables or portion control, which I'm sure the grandparent knew but it's fine to emphasize it. I think the parent comment to yours is fine, just re-emphasizing key points that the parent didn't explicitly state.
Yeah but with other states and countries saying their privacy laws applies outside of the border, seems like a bunch of duplication and conflicting laws. Kinda insane as soon as you put something on a server, you are expected to comply with laws all over the world. For example School Districts in Ohio are suing Facebook for selling ads to a charter school that went out of business.

If someone from California buys a summer house and registers a car to keep in Vermont to garage there and never drives it to California, I wonder if California considers Vermont violating their new privacy law since no opt-out but wonder if they could really enforce it on Vermont anyways. Seems like uncharted territory, but I know some companies have said they plan to follow the sticker privacy laws even if you live outside of California or Europe since it's easier to developed processes that way.

Seems like privacy law in the US is all over the place. One for banking, one for children, one for education, one for health, one for email marketing and then laws scattered all over the different states. Then I think there's even a specific law about library books checkout history too. So seems bad for startups or even mid size companies to keep up with it, especially if states start saying it applies even if you don't have a office in California.

Then if you have a service, legal requests for peoples data you have to handle and the more popular you are, the more common people might misuse your services. For example drug dealers were using Sony Playstations to communicate with each other and then Jussie Smollett for example, Google has to hand over a year of Gmail relating to the hoax he pulled(Maybe he talked to others using Gmail when planning it), but I think if he was a European citizen then providers have to decide to break US or European law, but some stuff is as clear as mud. I feel in that case they'd follow the warrant and deal with breaking European law as I don't think they'd have much choice as a catch 22.

So even if you are trying to do the right thing following the law - maybe even helping get a dangerous criminal of the streets, so many conflicting privacy laws and different agencies responsible for different ones too. Not sure though if Europe has gone after any companies for handing over data to a foreign government relating to a valid legal request where they have offices or data centers but seems you could be screwed either way when trying to decide how to handle the conflicts. Then there was a case involving Microsoft, just because you are a US company if you keep servers anywhere in the world the US can subject them to requests. So sounds like a mess for a company to decide how to handle these edge cases where things conflict, so standardizing on one would help give businesses clarity. Maybe even treaties too.