skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Among the jobs most likely to be automated out of existence are those whose functions are the most similar to computers, including jobs like computer systems administrators, network architects, and computer support specialists, 60–70 percent of whose functions could be automated using current technology.

>Even the brainiest are not safe. In the finance industry, in recent years, we have seen the development of machine learning tools that can perform in minutes the same analysis for which a human com­puter science major required hours or even days. You can guess which of those resources was less expensive to retain.

EDIT: I'll note that the article cited to support the second point “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation" doesn't acutally refer to "Computer science majors". It lists programmers having a moderate (not high!) chance of automation... and also lists system administrators as having amongst the least automatable jobs of all. Then to support the point that system administrators would have their jobs automated a different paper was cited. I'm not sure how seriously I can take the author with such clear evidence of contradicting the articles it cited and cherry picking evidence to apparently support a point the author had in mind before these papers were ever read. Bluntly the article smacks of outright dishonesty obscured by citing a huge number of lengthy research papers...

Not sure if I buy this take. I received a laptop in school and back then this exact analysis was true and indeed the jobs of administrators, network architects, and computer support administrators was largely automated. So those jobs are far less prevalent than in my childhood right?

Except that's not what happened and the jobs became more prevalent as improved automation made computers cheaper and more useful. I'm not holding my breath over the imminent collapse of jobs involving computers simply because the current work can be automated by... people using computers. Sure this argument is undeniably true if you think computing will stay exactly like it is now except the current jobs will be automated and no new jobs will be created.

My crystal ball is as foggy as anybody elses though. Maybe we will hit the singularity and in that case computing jobs will likely be the very first to be completely replaced.
Mostly an article pushing their benchmark and article: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D19-1069.pdf. In the article they compare existing benchmarks against a criteria they create to show their benchmark is the only one that features the things they say are important. All the others are somehow deficient by the totally objective metric they create.
Can it use desert sand rather than riverbed sand?
Hi there! Unfortunately (or fortunately), they DO use computers in schools in Japan now. Albeit not like handing out Chromebooks, but there is computer classes and computer time. In Middle school, I believe there is a small push to use iPads and the like on occasion.

So, there is SOME use, but not like a Chromebook for everyone (Thank heavens!)

-- JD in JP
Cool printable calendar and planner for 2020
I feel like you were looking for the north American slang word "jive"
If the stock is readily available the short fees are next to nil. Only hard to borrow securities have impactful loan fees. In the common case you get paid to short as it’s a rebate on potential interest for the principal.
Not really, desert sand and riverbed sand have different characteristics with regards to smoothness and grain size, etc.. You really can just use desert sand.
> If I write a program in Unix using Java or Python, can I reuse the Unix sort to sort an array of items inside my program?

Yes, if you split your program into smaller programs (one which generates the unsorted data, and one which consumes the sorted data), at which point you could run 'generator | sort | consumer'. Or your program runs 'sort' as a subprocess and communicates over STDIO. In either case you'll need to serialize and deserialize the data in question.
Ah, citations and "obvious" claims, and to approach everything with a skeptical mindset, I see! Thanks!
API Life Cycle Governance Beyond Just API Design
Sometimes that's because you have to use a different language that doesn't have as much tooling,

Which popular languages these days don’t have a dedicated IDE, plug ins for popular IDE’s and/or support for the language server protocol?

sometimes its because a product gets discontinued, or your employer forces a different IDE, etc.

I wouldn’t work for a company that forced an IDE on me.

In that environment I think learning IDE-specific things makes a lot of sense.

Visual Studio Code works with multiple languages as does Visual Studio.
I discovered that most of my back pain went away when I started drinking enough water each day. Not to downplay back injuries, but I suspect many people are walking around slightly-dehydrated each day (and one of the 1st symptoms is headaches and/or back pain)!
Smoke-Testing Rust HTTP Clients
You’re already accepting a lower return by excluding these equities from your portfolio, just accept a slightly lower, lower one.
15 Sweet Websites for Free Artwork
You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.
This is a very regulated era, and the art of extracting money from megaprojects have been perfected by many parties.

It seems that China does not suffer from this "cost disease", but I don't know any real facts.
https://github.com/MasterScrat/Chatistics, or using python to find out you text more about poop than you thought. your experience may vary, try it out.
Hm, I was not aware psychology results were not reproducible to this extent. Maybe better to take stuff with a pinch of salt everytime then. Thanks~
Ironically, that section itself contains an extremely misleading statement:

> The data also showed that the Conservative Party received significantly more airtime than the Labour Party. In 2012 Conservative leader David Cameron outnumbered Labour leader Ed Miliband in appearances by a factor of nearly four to one (53 to 15)

No mention that in 2012, Cameron was the Prime Minister, so naturally he'd receive more attention.
A video recording of the MIT OCW courses is absolutely educational.

Many science/technology focused YouTube channels absolutely produce educational content.

You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education.

I'm deeply sorry that you've struggled with bad things you saw on the internet. That can be a compelling reason to limit access. But that doesn't redefine education.
As Wikipedia notes, this is kind of just a myth - http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model
ITA matrix [1] shows prices calendar within 1 month for RT or OW, and for multicity it allows ±2 days for each leg.

Although it doesn't always return the best results if it has to go through thousands of routes (e.g. you specify many origin & destination airports and don't restrict by airline).

[1] https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
I'm not sure what you're arguing, that nobody's perfect? Microsoft is aiming here to be carbon neutral in 2030. In ten years.

From my linked report;
A more energy efficient supply chain.

In 2015, we started engaging directly with suppliers to help them reduce their energy use.
We aim to educate them about energy efficiency, identify energy efficiency project
opportunities, and manage those projects to completion. We prioritize facilities with the highest
energy use and potential for improvement. Then we conduct energy audits and train suppliers
to uncover opportunities for energy efficiency—like replacing outdated or inefficient heating,
cooling, and lighting systems; repairing compressed air leaks; and recovering waste heat.
The assessments provide suppliers with a cost-benefit analysis for implementing energy
efficiency improvements.
Since the inception of this program in 2015, we have engaged 59 suppliers at 85 facilities. In
2018, our program implemented energy efficiency measures that prevented 466,000 metric
tons of CO₂e from entering the atmosphere.

So they are working with suppliers and have been for the past 5 years. They also have been cleaning up the chemicals their suppliers use.

You can't compare what they are doing to murder; it's legal for starters. But if you're relying on all the companies you do business with to make up your definition of 100% renewable, it's likely you'll never get there. They don't say anything about the energy used by the banks they do business with either.
All right I'll give you that on evaluation order. Did not realize that Haskell took it two steps further.

Logical Proofs are possible for most things that have logical definitions.

There are aspects of FP that can be enforced in your proof. You don't have to have a vague definition of good design or a vague definition of FP. Follow a strict but commonly agreed upon definition of both and derive a proof from there. It's very possible.
Look, to some extent we’re all ASD. I hate crowds. I get exhausted being in places where people are having thousands of loud conversations.

I’ll complain that I hate people. But you know what? I’m the one with the problem. Not them. They have every right to be and do as they please. If I don’t like crowds, I can easily avoid them by doing my errands some other time.

Point is, we cannot have society change it self to accommodate every whim. Your friend is ASD, it sucks but that’s just the way his (our) life is.
Maybe Gacrux (Gamma Crucis), a red giant 88 light years away:

https://www.space.com/23710-gacrux-gamma-crucis.html
I've been wondering lately how and whether Australia could use its position as the biggest exporter to deliberately wreck the global thermal coal market, and consequently, coal usage.

I'm definitely not an economist, but would it be feasible, if coal production could be co-ordinated nationally, to manipulate the market through (I'm guessing) either or alternately dumping coal on it or suddenly cutting it off, possibly in an unpredictable manner? Does Australia have enough weight to make a difference? And would this have any effect greater than cutting off production entirely?
DoD's having a crisis with its trusted Foundry Program [1][2].

Originally, IBM's East-Fishkill plant was the largest trusted-foundry of near latest generations (14nm, 22nm) but that was sold off to Global-Foundries, which then sold it off to ON Semiconductor. Now it needs someone to fab the latest generation with a full chain-of-trust.

[1] https://semiengineering.com/a-crisis-in-dods-trusted-foundry...

[2]https://www.dau.edu/cop/dmsms/DAU%20Sponsored%20Documents/Ou...
> The abstractions ... [are] very surprising

From this[1] insightful video essay by Kyle Kallgren:

>> Metaphor Shear -- That feeling all users experience when you realize the metaphor you are working in is bogus. When the computer fails you and you remember that there are a hundred translations between input and output. Codes and translations we don't have the time or patience to do ourselves. Intellectual labor that we've surrendered to a device.

>> The joke at the center of Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is about metaphor shear. The answer to an important question lost on its long journey from input to output. A computer glitch so huge, so strange and so embarrassing that its programmers have to make a computer the size of a planet to file a bug report.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A
The interface should be designed so that you can't butt-dial more than a couple attempts.

But if that does happen then the system of timeouts will prevent you from using up all the attempts.

None of that gets in the way of resetting the counter only when the user succeeds.
Thought I'd lend my 2 cents here. I'm a current Berkeley EECS undergrad.

These 8hr a week TA positions are very difficult to get and coveted by many students for (1) relationship to a professor which helps in such a large department and (2) the considerable amount of weekly pay.

Did the EECS department potentially ruin their short term future by not paying full tuition? Maybe.

They also do lean heavily on academic interns (unpaid students who work 1 or 2 hours a week), and I see this group increasing greatly in numbers after this decision is ruled.

Please ask me questions! I'm a past TA myself have a lot of friends who TA.
Just have everyone sign their work. No anonymous sources. Duh.

Anything unsigned is gossip.

Anything unsourced is propaganda.

This isn't rocket science.
> they are not obvious to newbies

Modern Lisps like Racket and Clojure are not that difficult to pick up. I think Clojure might be easier to learn than Python or Javascript. I'm serious.

Look, I understand the sentiment because I was on the same side relatively not too long ago. I never had a formal introduction into a Lisp. I thought Lisp is a dying language, something like Fortran, COBOL, or Pascal. On a whim, out of the blue, I tried learning it. I don't remember exactly why. I was bored or something. I started reading a book on Clojure. Then I found a conference that supposed to happen in a week. It was the first Clojure/Remote conf. I thought: "Well, it's remote. It's cheap. Let me try it out. What do I have to lose?" That conference has changed my life. Quite literally. I was fascinated by seeing awesome things people building. After the conf, I sat in my chair, staring into the void of my blank screen for several minutes. The next day, I went to the office and told them that I'm leaving. Without writing a single program in a language I did not know, I decided to find a job with a tech stack focused on Clojure.

There are lots of misconceptions circling Lisp. People look at Lisp code, and it just doesn't look "sexy" to them. And they immediately dismiss it, claiming it is hard to read. That's not true.

They say - it's dynamically typed mess. Without ever knowing that Clojure has a type system called Spec, which can do things, most other type systems cannot. There's a ton of research happening around type systems in Racket. "Little Typer" book teaches dependent types using a Lisp.

They say Lisp codebases don't scale - that's not true at all. The truth is - programming in Lisp makes people so productive, you don't need large teams to maintain a massive amount of work. And there are companies with large Lisp ecosystems, one example: NuBank in Brazil has over 400 engineers, and their primary language is Clojure.

People say Lisp is not popular. Sure, Clojure's popularity might look dwarfed in comparison with massively popular Python, Javascript, C++, Java, etc. However, Clojure, compared to other "esoteric" languages, is quite popular - today, it has more books, podcasts, conferences, and meetups. More than languages like Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Elm, Purescript, ReasonML, F#.

Learning Clojure has opened a world of possibilities for me personally. My only regret that I haven't gotten into Lisps earlier. Please, don't negatively take my advice. My intentions are sincere. I wish someone would've convinced me to try Lisp early in my career. Please, do sometimes try to get your head out of your shell and give it a try. I promise, if you give Lisp an honest and heartfelt try, you will find something unique. Even if you end up not using it, you will never regret learning it.
Well, apparently there's something more important to you than moving closer to work. That's your choice.
Particularly because the Terminator series took the same basic formula (military computer realizes it can rule humanity rather than serve it) and was very successful (well, the first two movies at any rate).
Can't they still differentiate on the food? What they put on their menu, how it tastes, etc?
>(which you rejected up-thread)

Where did I reject programming language theory? You mean type theory? I didn't reject it. I said it doesn't apply to functional because ADT's can be used on most programming styles outside of FP.

>None of these things is straightforward to control for, and I'd be extremely skeptical of any quantifiable metric someone shows me that purports to show clear wins in real-world software development based on language paradigm of all things.

Don't account for those things. Account for what can be measured. Cut through all the frosting and get to the main point. What is the exact definition of a well designed program when we don't factor in opinionated things like readability? At it's core their must be fundamental properties of a shitty program and a well designed one that exist outside of opinion and is pretty much universally agreed upon.
> Scala eventually gave up C# precisely because CLR reification proved a huge challenge with Scala semantics.

In other words, Scala was designed on a hack involving JVM's type erasure, then authors found out the hack can't be ported to CLR. That's another way to view it. Type erasure is a half-baked mess in original Java, it was causing headaches right with the first version of generics...
"However, if a worker rejects too many jobs too frequently, they may receive fewer job offers as a result."

They take those jobs because they lose all access to the chance of profitable jobs otherwise. The people working for door dash aren't exactly the sort of person with the ability to fully understand probabilities and statistics either. I'd say it's fair to assume their business model works by bullying the same psychological behaviors as videogame loot crates, lottery tickets, and casinos. That one huge order that pays $30 after tips quiets the anxiety of losing money on the previous ten orders even if the actual math places the driver in the red.
I wasn’t implying one way or the other and I don’t think that the parent post was either.

The point I was making that when I was writing C day in and day out and mostly just working with a combination of my own code and my companies vote libraries, it was easy to use just a text editor and the command line to build.

But things have gotten more complicated since then. No one could be expected to know the hundreds of functions that make up the entire AWS SDK or all of the options that you need to specify for a typical CloudFormation stack in yml. Of course now it’s even better with the Cloud Developer Kit that lets you generate yml programmatically using a static language - with autocomplete.
Actually I think it's the reverse; it is quite effective against China.
China needs huge amount of USD for supporting its internal needs for food, resources, etc. That's why Hong Kong is so important to China as she is the only city in China which can raise USD funds via the stock market.
A 'still ok' economy is the only thing to keep the legitimacy for the current authoritarian regime. If the economy turns bad, people will start challenging the regime internally.
Coal prices are currently slumping. I’m sure all the coal companies would love it if Australia increase their revenue by driving up price.

If Australia was able to double the price of coal, it would be what it was back in 2011.
This is like not believing in climate change.
"However, if a worker rejects too many jobs too frequently, they may receive fewer job offers as a result."

They take those jobs because they lose all access to the chance of profitable jobs otherwise. The people working for door dash aren't exactly the sort of person with the ability to fully understand probabilities and statistics either. I'd say it's fair to assume their business model works by bullying the same psychological behaviors as videogame loot crates, lottery tickets, and casinos. That one huge order that pays $30 after tips quiets the anxiety of losing money on the previous ten orders even if the actual math places the driver in the red. Most people have a very poor sense for overhead costs like vehicle maintenance. The link between miles driven and the rate of repairs required just isn't there.
State-of-the-art models (using BERT) are far from achieving human performance (0.504 vs 0.822).

This is moderately surprising.

In question answering (QA) style tasks (SQUAD, SQUAD 2) we see state of the art models approach human performance. QA is similar to KBC in the sense that the answers are usually extracted from text in a similar way.

I'd imaging there is potential for fairly rapid improvement in this (Knowledge Base Population) task.
Front end engineer is the best job in America in 2020 according to Glassdoor
This looks like an odd introduction to Vulkan with a strong meme focus. Content seems reasonable.
My take is that road access is severely underpriced.

If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7.

But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.
Fair enough, I agree.

Saying it's adult stuff to children is demeaning and can temper enthusiasm and is a bad habit to get into.
Regarding voluntary adoption, I watched an interesting video on YouTube about this a few days ago which handles it from a "diffusion of innovation" point of view:

https://youtu.be/N9d0NqSztWA

Absolutely worth the 10 minute watch giving you some useful ideas for selling tech innovations to your organization.
I'm always really surprised that white people can't squat.
The billions part is harder to justify, but they spent $260 million on startups to recycle plastics.
It’s also fundamentally that Taiwan, much like some parts of China, are concentrated electronics and hardware hubs.

The same way there is Silicon Valley. Sure, there are tangential benefits to each area, but ultimately it’s about concentration.
Ask HN: Have you ever felt your life is going nowhere?
Hi, HN!

Have you ever felt your life is going nowhere?

To provide some context: programmer in his early 30s from Costa Rica (Latin America), 3 years of experience in backend development (mostly Python and Go), second year of CS major and second year of math major (i.e., no degree yet).

Initially, my idea was to grow a career in academia by combining computer science and math (e.g., research in formal methods/applied logic). However, I have been struggling with courses for years, as I don't feel capable enough and drop them. I'm aware I sabotage myself by belittling myself, but no professional therapy nor meds have helped.

Plan B would be building CRUDs for the next decades to come.

I don't feel I have the moral authority to call myself a professional, as I don't have a degree yet. Even with a CS degree, I would feel I don't really know my stuff deep enough. That very intellectual curiosity led me to taking math, but I lack the mathematical maturity. I might actually lack "algorithmic maturity".

Development jobs that are good enough are rather scarce in Costa Rica. Recruiters just discard my CV, except for the actual jobs I've had (which I have quit).

Working in the US or in Germany (fluent in German) could be an option, but companies and authorities there expect a foreign skilled worker to have a college degree related to their job position.

I also considered starting a software business. But growing a profitable business idea requires an immense amount of stamina and focus (I lack both), finding customers is really hard, etc. So I discarded it.

Every few months I ponder about ending my life (I did actually try 15 years ago), as I never see a way forward. Depression and anxiety disorder (I have both) are indeed career destroyers: academia/companies are wise to ignore you, as you are perceived as unreliable to endure hard tasks. For recruiters, you are just a risk to be avoided.
I gave up 1/3rd of the way through and figured I'd check the HN comments and anyone would mention any highlights if they mattered.

Feel proud that my BS detector is apparently functioning well!
That's exactly the calculus a company like Tesla does before taking a mass consumer product like a car to market.