skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks.

The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews.

It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.

However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don't game for higher rankings.

A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.
If you collect data from third-party APIs and then re-sell them, you are a data broker. If you only use the data, then you aren't.
Addressing your number points:

1) An appeal to the popularity of ad tech is not a sufficient argument in this case. First, it is tautological: At issue from my original comment is the sheet volume of talent it has attracted. Implicit within that is popularity. As such, you cannot use popularity to justify the phenomena.

2) Nor is the belief of people working in the field that it is useful a compelling argument. And of course it is trying to make advertising a better experience etc. But that just says "if it has to exist, it might as well be good at its job" and doesn't provide show a prima facie argument for it to begin with.

For both 1 & 2, you could easily replace Ad Tech with military equipment and arms dealers. I'm not saying one is as bad as the other. I'm saying the flaws in the arguments become more apparent.

3) This, I think, is where we agree. But I think alternate business models, had they rose to prominence instead, might have been better for society. But counter-factuals are inherently difficult to prove, and it's certainly possible we'd be in a worse state had things worked out differently.
Paying taxes for a working government is simply not the social contract we made in the United States. You may be thinking of other forms of government. The US Constitution says that you, as one of the people, are the ultimate authority of the government. In a representative democracy, this means not only electing representatives but advising them and holding them to account. The transactional nature you are suggesting simply doesn’t exist. Good governance is not an entitlement program, it’s part of your duty as a citizen.
How about lax environmental regulations in developing countries leading to cheaper products paid for by ecological wastelands? That should be enough to get over that particular rhetorical hangup although you don't sound like you're capable of being convinced in this case either because your convenience depends on a barrage of information aimed at everyone unlucky enough to pass by a computer screen (or go outside).

Regardless, the GGP's arguments are specious, circular, and delusional. The fact that the GP used slavery as an example doesn't take away from that. (And yes I get the irony of this post, advertising is that hill I chose to die on).
This is really great.

I found the example comments confusing. I expected to see the kind of comments I would find on a ticket, not “what are you working on?”
When I heard about "memory palaces" I thought it would be cool if there was some sort of "hashing function" from concept to 3D space, to initially accommodate the thoughts/notes of a certain kind in a certain area of that space. That way you would get closely related concepts closely together in space too.

Wilmot's Warehouse also comes to mind [1] :-)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4
The only way we NEVER fully get self driving cars is if we nuke or bioterrorism advanced civilization off the planet in the next 50 years.
I have an iPhone X, which is the only other device I own with a Lightning port. I use a Qi charger for it.

I also have an iPad Pro and a laptop that uses USB-C for power.

In fact, I had to look it up and was surprised to see that the iPhone 11 has a Lightning port. Odd.
I'm not sure the JMH is meaningfully included in the JDK for others to use. The JDK happens to come with some JMH-based benchmarks in the source tree, that seems to be about it.
Qualtrics
Yes and no -- of course if one uses more points the result can be more accurate. The real difference between a center difference and contour integration is that differences suffer from loss of information in finite-precision arithmetic. For example, in (f(x+h) - f(x-h))/(2h), the numerator actually contains very few bits of information when h is small. The Cauchy integral formula, in contrast, behaves quite well so long as the point of evaluation is bounded away from the contour.
No, this is how it works in almost every industry. Even if that's how they try and force hires into the pipeline, if you're simply accepting that instead of circumventing it, you're success rate must be abysmal.

I don't work in tech. But I've got about a 60% lifetime success rate (Job offers to applications). 100% once I got to the interview stage. And that's in a variety of industries: EMS, academic research, the energy industry, and civil/environmental engineering.

I swear nobody has any hustle anymore. I've never bothered to make a LinkedIn or go to "networking" or "hiring" events. They're a waste of time. If you're really out of your existing network (you're probably already doing something seriously wrong if that's the case), you'd be better off figuring out where you want to work and then waiting at a nearby lunch spot for an obvious group of employees to come in around lunchtime (or after work drinks) and start chatting them up. (I actually landed a job doing that.) Or better yet, find a CrossFit gym some of them go to. Sweat and bleed and bond with someone a bit before you leverage them as a recommendation. There's a million ways into an organization if you want it badly enough. If nothing else you can get super good intelligence on how to craft your application to be desireable.

Do your research, know your shit, know exactly what they're looking for before you ever turn in an application. Become that person to the core. Get any new certifications you need to be that person. Make every document you turn in to apply for the position fit that profile. Make every searchable piece of information about you on the internet align with that profile. Know the way they conduct interviews before you get there, and practice and rehearse the questions and flow of your responses in broad ways. Leverage your contacts in the organization to get information about each of the interviewers and how they think and approach interviews.

You know, hustle.
Similar for me as a Detroit fan with Justin Verlander. Half of me is glad to see his World Series win wasn’t revoked, but the other half says he was party to the cheating and should have been punished. But the shame is he’s one of the best pitchers in the game without cheating... why did he do it? Shame indeed.
The phrase "rent seeking" is a technical term with a meaning.

How can the government be accused of it? When private entities engage in rent seeking, they are manipulating the government for profit.

And when private entities do things that do not involve manipulating the government, then how can it be rent seeking?

Rent seeking does not mean literally, simply, "seeking rent". I know people like to say the meaning of words change, but you have to be talking about the same thing as other people using the same word.
If your money goes 2x further after the move, then you might be much better off even with a salary reduction. This means a move could be a win for both google and the employee.

Also, pegging your salary to corporate profits has its downsides. At Boeing, a good chunk of the worker bees negotiated their bonuses to be pegged to the quarterly profits. They were pretty unhappy about this when the 737MAX problems tanked profits, and the bonuses vanished.
For information, it's the "Petersham Pause" or "Marrickville Moment" :) There should also be the "Tempe Tumult" because you can basically reach up and touch one of the bastards at that stage.

Flying around the states I always got the impression that things were a little rickety, that SFO vid is nuts though.
Thank you for your detailed reply, and I'm totally on board with how "American" is basically a meaningless term that means nothing except for, roughly, the citizenship status of an individual.

> And so, stereotyping Americans is, well, at the end of the day, fairly ignorant.

Any stereotyping is ignorant, and I'm sure you'd agree with that. Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Eastern European, Italian, Indian, Syrian, Computer Nerd, Musician, Redhead, Hipster, Bogan, Redneck, Boomer. No single word can encapsulate anything but one immediate descriptor of any individual.

This appears to be something that's been lost, and is only moving further away, in political discourse around the world, pandering to fear of stereotyped groups. And politicians only use it because it works. Sadly.
All valid concerns.

It's funny how much was based on LIBOR when it provided zero indication of depth-of-market for the banks feeding it numbers.
An interesting phenomenon. Are we interested in it because it seems to be a rare and observable event that seems “magical”? Or is there a deeper search for meaning here?
The Astros also adjusted the placement and angle of that center field feed in order to get a better unobstructed view of the catcher’s signs around that time as well. Before and after images showing the difference of position from what was supposed to be the same camera and how much better the view was.
Germany aggressively uses EU money to bludgeon mainly Eastern European states info accepting policies made in Brussels. Germany has done a lot worse as well obviously.
Out of interest, how high is the insanely high landing fees? I tried Googling but could not find an answer.
> But this is a negotiation.

Sure. But negotiating for a piece of the action comes in the form of deciding on stock options and grants. Salaries don't go up and down with profits.
This should really be the linked article, much more informative. The charts at the bottom are particularly helpful for understanding the sequence of events (and seeing the conflict between standard departure and go around routes).

It will be interesting to see the investigation for this, as a layman I don't know if such conflicting routes are standard, and how ATC is supposed to respond to such a situation (presumably not by leaving it to the pilot to avoid, like in this case, however).
Rclone is a fantastic tool. Thanks!
I can. I mean, Australia is OH&S mad & really full on biosecurity. I do high risk work as a rigger, we need a whole bunch of random OH&S qualification, then on a job, might have rope access gear a bunch of tools, and that's just showing up for a gig. In this case you're talking the same, plus helicopter experience (belaying down), ability to signal and radio with a helicopter, search and rescue qualifications, firefighting experience. Can't imagine that in addition to putting on the harness and kitting up, they had a bit of a spraydown before hand. It would probably be something that kills fungi and bacteria, maybe as simple as tea-tree oil.
If you have the LNG infrastructure in place, you could change your suppliers at the flick of a switch.

Doubly so if you own the ships too.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/united-states-should...

But of that 4.7T budget we only spend 600 million of that on fusion research.
Thoughts from a Freeway Lover
To some degrees I understand but I think this a dangerous path. The Mac is a tool for creators and professionals so if they make the Mac into an iPad then people will just buy iPads. Maybe that’s what Apple wants but I think it’s very dangerous to drive away the people who made you successful.
Java has had lambdas since Java 8. (I don’t know if you’d consider them “crippled” or not; they are less crippled than Python’s.)
Gordon Brander's pattern wiki is probably the best contemporary example I can think of that implements the Zettelkasten pattern: http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/

I think part of what can make the concept hard to see in practice, is that it's both the Zettelkasten artifact, and your methodology for adding and linking concepts when you're learning
This only applies to garbage tier cites that should either be bulldozed or if near a city that people want to live in just be annexed.
Oh, not Rice's theorem again. That only applies to infinite systems. There are useful decidable properties for a reasonably large set of programs. Yes, they're "uninteresting" mathematically, but we're talking about memory safety here. If your program is anywhere near undecidable in that area, you're doing it wrong. Any time you're close to the edge on that, you can get decidability with a run-time check. The Microsoft Static Verifier people have been down that road with some success. I went there 40 years ago, with the Pascal-F Verifier.

The question I'm asking is, what do you really need to do that you can't do in safe code. On the memory safety front, for pure Rust (no calls to C), probably not all that much. Maybe only this:

- Syntax for talking about partially initialized arrays. For a collection, you have a variable that indicates how much of the array has been initialized, and you need a statement in the language that ties that variable to a partially initialized array. Then you can do simple inductive proofs to show that as you initialize another element and add 1 to the counter, the entire array is initialized. Non-consecutive initialization would require more complex proofs. Is there a real use case for that? One with major performance implications, where initializing the data to some null value would be too slow?

Un-initialized blocks of types such as raw bytes aren't a problem, because those types are "fully mapped" - all bit combinations are valid. Only types that are not fully mapped an initialization guarantee.

- Backlinks. Backlinks in doubly-linked lists and trees obey some simple invariants. You need syntax to say "this is a backlink". That implies an invariant that if A points to B, B must point back to A. Everything which updates A or B must preserve that invariant. The pointer from B back to A then no longer needs to have ownership of A. (It's a problem that Rust doesn't have "objects", because such invariants are usually required to be true when control is outside the object, but can be broken momentarily while control is inside it. The inside/outside distinction is important for this, and Rust is a bit soft on that. Spec# took inside/outside seriously, but viewed it dynamically, rather than being tied to static scope. Haven't looked at that in years.

What else do you really need? Remember that some knotty ownership problems can be resolved by allocating the objects in an array which owns them, and using array indices for relationships between the objects. It's not like you have to use pointers.

Concurrency is a related issue, but I've said enough for one night.
I wouldn't say that iTunes died of natural causes, but rather that Apple killed it. Bit by bit over the course of years starting with the iPod Photo when they added picture syncing, then video, etc etc. Even podcasts never really fit in that well with the static library model that worked so well for your music library.

It's too bad because when it was just an app to manage your music library it was clean, easy to use and logical. When it had to manage the kitchen sink of crap that Apple piled into it and morphed into a syncing app first and music player/library management became a secondary (or lower) priority, it never had a chance.
I'm used to the value of the land vs. the structure being listed separately on a property tax bill.

The value that is attributable to the community is the value of the land before building. Obviously that's far higher in the middle of NYC or SF or something. So I'm not sure what you are saying about low density housing.

There is/was a political movement to finance everything with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The advantage is that with almost everything you can tax, you get less of it, which is usually bad, and besides leads to avoidance and lower revenue. But unimproved land cannot be "discouraged" by taxes, and owners cannot pass the taxes on - their incentive is then to not leave it vacant, which is a very good thing in a dense city.
Their incentive would be a manufactured one, painting the citizenry as part of some conspiracy/extreme party etc. Just look at how many Republican news outlets continuously portray the other side as extreme and crazy and dangerous.

Just having possession of armed weapons makes absolutely no difference to a modern, well equipped American military force. We’re talking about Armored Personal Carriers and Tanks rolling through cities, all communications being monitored or cut off. The arms may make it hard for the occupying force as there will be more shootouts but retributions will keep most of the populace under control.

The dynamic of Armed militias being a deterrent to a military occupation made sense in the 18th century but don’t make much sense today.
Isn't it ironic that the complaint is about technology, and yet none of us can find anything to back up the claim?
If you want more than 200GB, you have to get the 2TB plan. There's nothing in between.
> hence the significantly bigger gaps between consecutive trains compared to the gap between consecutive cars or trucks

A lot of this is because railway signalling operates on a brick-wall principal: it is constantly assumed the vehicle in front could come to a dead halt instantaneously, whereas most road situations assume if you can match the braking performance of the vehicle in front with some margin.

The railway case is safe for the trailing vehicle in the situation there's a concrete block on the track ahead, the road one is not.
U.S. Army Hacked by 52 Hackers in Five Weeks
The conquest of Crimea was probably more about providing a distraction for domestic audiences than anything else?
I'm not the only one who thought exactly the same thing, eh?
Mining notes for data is a terrible idea and a very quick way to guarantee that you never get any users.

Pricing in this regard is a signal for stability. If you’re paying for a service, it is far more likely to stick around. And the more stable the product, the more likely is a user to actually use the app — especially for a note taking app.
Dependence goes both ways. Russia was reduced to (or built from the ashes as) a resource extraction economy; it's extremely dependent on Europe paying for its gas.
> possibly going so far as to annex a Baltic country or two. Today this would be inconceivable

Russian doctrine is that the satellite countries are buffers to be used as needed, like Kleenex.

It's 100% certain Russia will annex Baltic countries whenever it pleases. To say otherwise just makes you "a useful idiot", as Lenin is credited with saying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
The idea on that section of the site is to show the annoying messages we end up getting in Slack that could've been avoided if everything was documented properly in the issue that it belonged to.

But now that I think about it, I agree it is confusing and might change that section of the site, thanks.
EFF Asks SCOTUS to Stop Broad Interpretations of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
It's depressed because oil prices are low. When they're high Houston does better than the national average, when they're low it does worse.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/oil-price?ty...
https://realestate.usnews.com/places/texas/houston/jobs
A distinction I think should be made is that the value of land before you build on it is entirely due to the community and natural characteristics.

So why not tax only on that value and not the value of any structure or improvements?

The wisest thing I every heard from a libertarian or conservative was "if you tax something you get less of it". It therefore follows, not that we should eliminate taxes, but that we should tax something which is immune to the effect and only that.
I’m not sure that any browser extension (Clearbit in your example) would have to register. It’s pretty clear that you have a “direct relationship” with them when you install their extension.
If Russia annexes any Baltic states it's liable to trigger nuclear war. All the Baltic states are NATO members.
>I'm talking about positive effects to "the world" / society / the public at large. Obviously not to the people getting their pockets filled.

People buying stuff from those businesses must at least think they are benefitting from the transactions in some way.
Reinventing the computer: Brain-inspired computing for a post-Moore's Law era
At the very least, when a company acquires my data through any mechanism, it should be forced to email me with a copy of all the data they have on me, and with a one click link to get them to delete the data and permanently opt out.

Any company found in procession of personal data without the appropriate (delivered) email notifications being sent should be fined at minimum $1000 per individual, and criminal charges if intentional.

This won't put anything like services you voluntarily sign up for out of business (as they send sign up confirmations anyway, or should).
I don't doubt their intelligence or talent in solving problems. But chasing the highest Total Compensation, or glittering silicon jewel, or a comforting workplace that closely resembled the social & work dynamics they'd just graduate from in college... they were comfortable choices to make. Even chasing money losing startups for the first decade of your career always held the prospect of an off-ramp to one of the established players. Chasing work that moves the needle forward on culture, society, and civilization often requires a higher tolerance for risk and discomfort.
Neither the salary needs nor the profit margins really influence Google salaries. Employees are paid salaries based on the margin at the market.
As someone who has experienced this happen to my home city I can vouch. It does suck.
Surprisingly, the tariffs aren’t equal: 10% on EU imports, 2.5% on US imports.

It’s not a ton, but it’s not nothing.

Why not just hire Germans, then? Frankly, Musk empirically isn’t the type to list on experts in manufacturing — he ignored them entirely when trying to fully automate the Model 3 production line. So your hypothesis strikes me as unlikely.

Doing it to spite the German automakers, though, that I’d believe!
Reminds me of the cloud laboratories like Transcriptic[1], Emerald Cloud Lab[2], DeskGen[3]. Ginko seems similar, but for a synthetic biology.

[1] https://www.transcriptic.com/

[2] https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/

[3] https://www.deskgen.com/landing/
Quirky Things That Programmers Say
I have a set of the WH1000XM3's, coming from a couple of different QC over ear headphones. I love the WH1000XM3's to death. They sound great, are comfortable, and have very good battery life.
That was probably true 4 years ago. It's not at all obviously true today.
A kid of John Carmack is likely to have a cognitive capacity that is a standard deviation or two to the right of even the "smart" kids in class. Genetics isn't everything but it's not nothing.