skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engine and prior to that, it was the discovery of electricity.

So he proves this out by taking an example of what happens if you hit someone on the head and assuming that person sleeps for a long time, how will he feel out of place in the world. Here are the examples I remembered he used (paraphrasing):

1. If you take someone living in the 1700s, knock them on the head, and have them wake up any time till the mid 1800s, to that person, life feels almost the same even though 100s of years have passed. Sure, maybe there are more buildings, more people, more horses, weapons are more or less the same, etc but essentially life is still familiar.

2. Now take someone living in, lets say 1850, knock them out and have them wake up in 1880. Holy shit, suddenly the world is so much brighter and there are "lights" everywhere. What witchcraft is this?? The world will look so different from what he/she remembers them.

3. Now take that same person living in 1880, hit them on the head again and have him/her wake up 35 years later and it is 1915. HOLY DOUBLE CRAP, what is this new fangle machine on wheels on the streets people are on and where have all the horses gone?? Ok I need to go into the toilet and wash my face...OMG WHAT IS THIS FLUSHING THING AND THIS METAL SPROUT CREATES MY OWN CLEAN RIVER??? Walks to the city and wow, look at all these buildings looking like mountains! And not only that, he/she looks up in the sky and sees gigantic "metal birds"...WTF YOU CAN RIDE THEM AND NOW GET FROM LA TO NY in a couple of hours?? The world will look completely magical to them.

Now here is the interesting thing - if you take someone from 1920s, hit them on our head, and put them in 2020.. that economist surmises that life will look pretty much the same to that person, not unlike scenario (1) where you take someone from 1700s and put them in the 1800s. Vehicles might look a bit more modern, buildings might look a bit more taller or "sleek-er", there are way much more people but essentially, the world hasn't really change much. Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it.

So yep, it is nothing to do with you. We just happen to live in a time where we have yet to experience a "leap" in invention where life has become completely magical to us. My guess will be, the day space tech becomes a common place and attainable, that will be when the world looks magically different to those of us living today and that generation will feel the same leap as the inhabitants living from 1850~1920.
It's effectively an epidemiological transmissibility or chain-reaction question.

If a given debris item strikes, on average, <1 other objects before deorbiting, then the Kessler cloud will (eventually) disperse, absent new objects being inserted.

If a given debris item strikes, on average, 1 other object, the Kessler cloud is self-sustaining (or at least until particle size drops to some minimum).

And if a given debris item strikes, on average >1 other objects, the cloud grows and the collision rate increases with time, again until the material is sufficiently dispersed and/or eventually deorbits.

Launching new satellites sustains this equation.

Accidental or intentional debris-field creation of course greatly exacerbates it.

(What the theshold is for >1 collisions I have no idea, I suspect there's research on this.)
The trick used by some parsec parsers is interesting. Instead of trying to keep track of balanced indents and unindents, they just check the intent of the first token of a statement. If it's not the "right" indent, the parse fails. When that happens, it usually ends the current block and tries again with the next indent level. It's not that inefficient because the backtracking happens on the first token of the statement.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/indents
ABCL exists and is easier to use java libs from than Clojure
How to Find and Sort Files Based on Modification Date and Time in Linux
Migrating Our Cloud Infrastructure to Google Cloud
TLA+ is really good at finding problematic traces involving concurrent agents, so it naturally shines in distributed systems.

For something that relies on finding problematic inputs (like for compilers), SMT solvers like Z3 are a more natural fit
Bed bugs. The modern equivalent would be bedbugs. Breeding them would be comically easy, and distributing them in public places would be extremely hard to detect.

Buses, doctors offices, libraries, offices, You could cause a lot of damage with this.
Here’s one possibility:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/17/russia.iantray...

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/molotovs-proposal-t...
You can make a baby and a bitmap in nine months
Or look at twitter. It encourages extra small glibe comments as the standard instead of long thoughtful posts.

Possible, instead of only small posts it should be only long posts or none at all.
Vathys (YC W18) Is Hiring a Machine Learning Compiler Engineer
Location: Remote

Vathys is hiring a machine learning compiler engineer to build the core compiler to a system that will be a step function improvement in ML capability.

The ideal candidate:

1. Has a good understanding of the fundamentals of deep learning algorithms. Less "I can use Keras" and more "I can write a CNN from scratch in numpy".

2. Has used a NN compiler framework or IR framework in the past such as TVM, MMdnn, MLIR, Glow, Tensor Comprehensions, etc.

3. Has experience with compilers, especially optimizing compilers and compilers for high performance code.

4. Has experience writing kernels for deep learning applications.

Generous compensation will be provided to the right candidates.

Please contact tapabrata_ghosh[at]vathys[dot]ai if you're interested.
lol. You guys are really sensitive about your shitty money.
Relational data normalization at least to 3NF.
Same here! Since quitting the news I'm much happier and have much more time and energy to devote to fun and productive things.
Honestly I would not shed a single tear if node.js and npm got thanos'd out of existence overnight. It is hands down the worst thing to happen to software, arguably even worse than C.
I forget the details or where this applies but someone before on here has mentioned that restaurants are allowed to use a certain percentage of tipped workers time on non-tipable duties like those types of tasks. The usual caveat of minimum wage after tips would still apply.
Wozniak wasn't naive, Jobs was just a shitty person.
For the higher orbital shells they're using, it can easily take 100+ years to deorbit from atmospheric drag alone
Isn't LessWrong a pseudo-intellectual personality cult with lots of big words but little substance? I wonder how one can produce this much output tho.
No, if u keep changing frequently!
Agree.

IRS will chase you for unpaid taxes (and even these should be high enough to justify the effort) but highly unlikely anyone will bother to do anything for unpaid $200/yr or so silly fees.
No. Sucking it up is acceptance of the situation, the very opposite to making changes
This another example of what is called the Master-Slave dialectic from Hegel, an 18th century philosopher. Something that I studied in a philosophy class and had a profound influence on my understanding of work. Please take 10' to understand it and it applies to the relationship between engineers and salespeople, to the relationship now between China and the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_dialectic
The Iowa Caucuses App Had a Security Problem
Drill bits are expensive, and their lifetime can be an hour under good conditions but only seconds when pushed too hard. You can significantly slow down the war machine with stuff like that.
Not sure about the "fortunately" bit. It's nice that the dystopia hasn't captured everything yet, but uneven distribution of technological power is kinda what reinforces the dystopia.
> C99 is both a dead language and still considered new

Lest anyone doubt this, I recently worked on a (proprietary) library that the company kept C89-clean because some (similarly proprietary) embedded targets are basically frozen in the mid-90s.
#1 Stock market game for student
Could have been, but I’m happy to develop in js and upload it so anybody could just visit the site and run. Build till worldwide is infinitely faster. Especially for smaller projects. e.g

http://aperocky.com/prehistoric
I've had a small 3rd party encounter with mental health services here in Virginia.

I got about half way through the article, couldn't finish it. Honestly, what this doctor is doing with TMS sounds just like what I saw the doctors do here. Throw crap at the wall and see what sticks.

Talk with the patient for fifteen minutes, prescribe them a drug cocktail, hold for a few days, say some mumbo jumbo about having a small spirit child inside you. You have to see a judge before we release you. Nevermind, no you don't. Time to go, boot them out the door.

And here's the HN crowd, getting all excited about the potential of micro dosing LSD. I think my baking soda volcano from grade school was more scientific.

I'm not saying there's no point in trying. I'm just saying I think we're over confident in what we think we know. At some point, it starts to feel like we're just making it up as we go along.
Then use the car industry as an example: the American car manufacturers' internal combustion engines looks identical to those of the the Germans.

To quote you: "who figured out how to build them first."
Has anyone had success with Microsoft for Startups? Do they actually bring deals or just pressure to run azure?
Google ordered to reveal author of Australian dentist's bad review
Which is their billing rates.
If you encourage your neighbors to vote, local politicians will pay more attention to your area. I doubt it goes much broader than that.
It looks to me like a lot of discussion about the viability/usefulness of Handshake itself, which I have no problem with; the post sparked a discussion, and that's cool with me. There are a couple of things about Bob I'd like to state, just so it's here for future readers, as I had hoped to answer questions about the software.

1. Bob is an electron application that also is a Handshake resolver and full node - you can find these projects at:
http://github.com/handshake-org

2. We're looking for contributors and help of all kinds! Like any other open-source project, bug reports, suggestions, and contributions are very much welcome. Personally, my concerns as an engineer are around the scalability of the UI (electron can be hard to work with) when many (possibly hundreds) of domains are being watched or bid on. This is behaviour I believe is possible to see, from observing early internet domainers.

3. Like many non-custodial 'wallet' projects, it is meant to be a reasonable alternative to exchange custody, but we don't provide any guarantees as the user is responsible for self-custody. We intend to add hardware wallet support in the future. The goal is for the average person to have an easier time working with Handshake and Handshake names, by using Bob instead of a cli.

4. Bob is maintained by Kyokan, and I am the CEO there. It is not maintained by the Handshake team, and there is no Handshake foundation or business that runs the project. Kyokan is a separate software engineering consultancy that is working on multiple projects - we are also not a part of the Handshake team. Our contact info for security disclosures is in the repo.

5. Name Auctions and Airdrop claims on Handshake's mainnet start today (in under 8 hours), so it felt appropriate to share this repo, which we've spent a lot of time and effort working on. One can also find details about this in the repo, but we all hope you have a good time using the software!

Again, we're looking for feedback and suggestions. Even in the process of making this post, I found a few bugs, filed them and made minor improvements to the documentation. Thanks for reading!
The number of collisons required to negatively impact satellite operations is vastly lower than that required to attenuate solar flux.

Satellite observations of Earth's ground and meterological conditions are vastly more useful than an equivalent expense of space-based solar shielding.

And if you really want to block solar flux, there are far more efficient options, either atmospheric aerosols or L1 orbiting centrifugally-stabilised nanofilm mirrors.

Though I'm dubious about the practicality of any such, the notion of a reflecterised or even simply an absorptive graphene film might be a potential application of such a material. The challenge would be to get it into position, deploy it, and maintain position and orientation over time, without disrupting the fabric itself. As an application for a very low mass-to-area substance with high opacity or reflectivity (as an absorption medium, it would re-radiate thermal energy in all directions as a blackbody, reflectorisation would tend to halve the necessary area, if I'm thinking this through correctly).

Graphene is increadibly lightweight, at 0.763 mg/m^2, or 0.763 kg/km^2. A shield capable of blocking 1% of solar flux (1% * 2 * pi * (8000 km)^2) would weigh about 3 million kg, or 3,000 tonne, if comprised of a single graphene layer.
The actual mass budget would be far larger, but based off this minimum with addition of more structural members (likely: nanofilliments), guidance, station-keeping, and possibly some form of visibility enhancements. The concept isn't immediately and obviously intractable, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

The total material required would be a minuscule fraction of that require to blanket numerous orbital levels in particles of similar blocking potential.
The art of electronics is pretty good at combining theoretical concepts with practical circuit tips and tricks, definitely worth (non-negotiable!) having on the shelf.
Considering it is illegal in the UK and frowned upon by the IRS, it leads me to think you are confusing adoption of children with the adoption of adult men.

Note how often these adult men are being adopted along with marrying the daughter of the family. I dare say outside of Japan such an arrangement would be considered weird.
Potentially interestingly, it looks like there's ongoing work to get Ada compiling to wasm via LLVM too.

Hello World style demo:

https://blog.adacore.com/use-of-gnat-llvm-to-translate-ada-a...
Two things come to mind: 1) Consumers want an iPhone, not an iPhone equivalent from China, 2) Apple might have enough influence and connections to evade blatant theft.
It does seem like something motivated more by a desire to make it exist than a desire to use it. Also to have a project where both your program and your programming language are lispy.
It's tempting to just drop this one because it's borderline flamebait, but there are so many pernicious misconceptions here that it's worthwhile calling them out explicitly. I'm generally not into author-chiding, but TBH the post was written in a very inflammatory and ignorant fashion that I'd encourage the author to be more thoughtful in the future so that we can all get out of the muck.

1. False choice between "unsafe" and "new" languages. No, just no. Safe languages have been around since the 1960s (e.g. LISP). While it's not really "C versus the world", C/C++ are in the vast minority when it comes to safety across all programming languages. Throw a stick, hit a safe programming language. Java, C#, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, R, Lisp, Clojure, Scala, Haskell, ML, Modula 3, TCL, JavaScript: the list goes on and on and on.

2. C programs don't break. Just plain false. C and C++ are underspecified languages, meaning they have undefined behavior in some situations--actually, most situations. Undefined behavior is silent and there are poor diagnostics. It's almost always a program bug. Undefined behavior and even nonportable behavior is absolutely rife in the C and C++ world. Programs aren't necessarily portable across platforms, compilers, language versions, and even compiler bugs. Well-specified languages give programs a much better chance of being portable. Which leads to:

3. Portability is mostly a language issue. This is only partially true. The fact is that portability and forward compatibility (time safety as this person calls it) is a function of dependencies--on the language version, compiler, external libraries, and general environment around the program too. Fewer dependencies generally means better forward compatibility. It's also good if those dependencies are maintained by teams who care a lot about backward compatibility. Some languages do more than others.

4. "Time safety" is a term. I have never heard of this term before, which just speaks to the uninformed nature of this post. I think the author means forward compatibility.

Anyway, if you feel like the core message of this post is that unsafe=future-proof, feel free to choose another unsafe language to do your next program. Hint: there aren't many.

PS: Java 1.0 is now 25 years old. Java 1.0 programs still compile today and the binaries that compiler generated back then still run on today's JVMs.
Wayfair layoffs: The retailer is cutting 550 jobs, 3% of its workforce
The whole concept of searching your employees after their shift just pisses me off.

Just install security cameras and track your inventory. If your inventory is off, check the security footage. This isn't rocket science.
Introduce 7 YouTube channels that uncover the developments in machine learning
Since we're already using O(N) space, it would be interesting to see how this compares to Radix sort[0], which is O(N) space but O(N) time ( due to just hashing everything ).

Like others have said, it would be cool to see quadsort stacked up to other current state-of-the-art sorting algorithms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort
There's a book by Neal Stephenson about this, called Seveneves.
Change is slowing down, at least in developed countries. A person from the US of 2020 would fit in right in 1970, and be able to adapt to 1920, but be lost in 1870. A person from 1970 would adapt a little quicker to 1920, but be almost as lost as us in 1870.
Just like I have had use of dating apps (they are simply indispensable in today's society, at least where I live, for someone who wants to date and is no longer in the "dozens of friends in the city" demographic), I sometimes feel a need for a social networking app/website that helps me keep in touch with updates from friends' lives especially now when we literally are countries and continents away. WhatsApp groups and WhatsApp statuses just doesn't cut it.

If only there was a feature rich app with a clean and pleasant interface (would prefer it to be paid). The defunct app Path comes to mind. It was quite good except that it was a privacy nightmare too.

But then their "life" updates would start to be overwhelmingly overrun by their fake, political, spam updates.
Counterpoint: NES games were handwritten in assembler for a long-dead architecture. You couldn't pick a worse development environment for "time safety". The source code for most of the games is lost, too. Yet they remain some of the most portable programs in existence, because of emulation.

The PC architecture is extremely well-documented in practice (as are alternatives like WebAssembly), and there are going to be emulators for them around for the foreseeable future. Emulators for the PC architecture are no more likely to die in the future than C compilers are. You will be able to run any program written for the PC, in any language, for a very long time.
I agree but I think regardless of profitability keeping small/medium businesses around is not just the for the longevity bragging rights. Some of these businesses preserve arts, techniques, handcrafts, recipes etc that might have otherwise been lost. And there is something to be said for street level neighborhood character created by these stores.
That's fair. I was really looking at the bottom of the barrel for reasons github would do this, other than vendor lock-in.
I actually use the service you described. It is called http://anonaddy.com .

I'm not affiliated to them (discovered them on Producthunt I think) but I use it all of the time for one-off eCommerce websites, newsletters, etc. you can have your own custom domain and anything before the @ is a wildcard and gets automatically created.

It is super easy to "delete" or stop the forwarding of email to these addresses
Linux accessing Windows is indeed way slower under WSL 2, and I get the impression from what I’ve heard that this is unlikely to ever be improved much. But working the other way round is a bit faster than it used to be, if I recall correctly, and working purely within ext4 is enormously faster than under WSL 1.

Combined with the steady improvements to being able to access the Linux side from Windows (under \\wsl$\machine-name), and being able to mount that to a drive letter (I have my ~/.zprofile run `/mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32/subst.exe A: '\\wsl$\arch' > /dev/null`, which delays subsequent login shell startups by 30–40ms, but that’s not too bad), shifting all your relevant stuff onto the Linux side and still working with Windows tools where desirable is quite feasible.

I moved all my files (including a >700MB Git repository) from C: to A: after upgrading to WSL 2. Well worth it. I do most of my work in a terminal (the Linux side) or in gVim (the Windows side).
> (aka Work-to-Rule)

Yup! Same thing, different name. "Italian Strike" is what they call it in European and Middle Eastern labor organizing traditions.

EDIT: With a bit of research: the term seems to have originated with the Biennio Rosso in Italy in 1919-20, when work-to-rule strikes were practiced on a large scale.
Sure, excluding two of the biggest revolutions in the entire history of humanity, really makes it seem like we've been doing absolutely nothing. The impact of the semiconductor / integrated circuit can not be overstated. I don't know about the rest of you, but the Internet still seems to be completely magical to me.
Building an Analytics Dashboard with Django
That's not entirely it. VS Code is Electron (not to mention doing a lot more) and somehow its faster than slack and uses about the same memory.
I've worked at companies with hundreds of staff and only a handful of tech employees. Many of those companies are exactly the type to hire babysitters/overseers/foremen.

I can't say this is happening for OP, but when the ratio is a hundred workers to one, the "other departments" are going to determine HR policies.

Tech companies aren't necessarily exempt from this. Many companies hire thousands of content moderators or tech support, many of whom are uneducated and lack self-discipline. There are the types who simply don't show up for work, take 2 hour long cigarette breaks, fake illnesses and weddings to skip work, steal toilet paper, and bully colleagues into doing the same.

Lots of tech companies bootstrap from there, and it's difficult for them to change workflow that's their bread and butter.
yes! thank you
Your son could just be training to be a penetration tester.
That might be true, but sort of secondary to the issue.

The developers would have more opportunities if there no barriers to publishing and distribution.

For example, if the developer type you are speaking of had access to two app stores, he would benefit from the competition.