skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting read.

Relatedly, FoundationDB has a distributed testing framework called “Simulation”, which can simulate distributed failures on a single machine (thread!). Quoting from https://pierrezemb.fr/posts/notes-about-foundationdb/ :

> We wanted FoundationDB to survive failures of machines, networks, disks, clocks, racks, data centers, file systems, etc., so we created a simulation framework closely tied to Flow. By replacing physical interfaces with shims, replacing the main epoll-based run loop with a time-based simulation, and running multiple logical processes as concurrent Flow Actors, Simulation is able to conduct a deterministic simulation of an entire FoundationDB cluster within a single-thread! Even better, we are able to execute this simulation in a deterministic way, enabling us to reproduce problems and add instrumentation ex post facto. This incredible capability enabled us to build FoundationDB exclusively in simulation for the first 18 months and ensure exceptional fault tolerance long before it sent its first real network packet. For a database with as strong a contract as the FoundationDB, testing is crucial, and over the years we have run the equivalent of a trillion CPU-hours of simulated stress testing.
What is the 'scheduling the "liveness" in the register file across the pipeline stages'? Is this part of garbage collecting or detecting when a register can be reallocated?
Despite your “joke”... no, there are exceptionally few instances of ISPs selectively throttling. The best example was a small carrier that the FCC slapped with a fine - before Net Neutrality rules existed.
In my experience, the best ways to maximize your income as a software engineer are to job hop, study data structures/algorithms, and learn how to market yourself. Companies rarely reward engineers who stay put.
Actually, the modern answer is "use something other than IRC", which is partly why Discord became so popular with gamers.

The answers to changing user tastes is not to proclaim their tastes are wrong. That's the attitude displayed by a lot of IRC server operators and prolific IRC users, and it's that refusal to adapt that's driving IRC into obsolescence.

Maybe those people are ok with an ever-dwindling userbase, and if so that's great. But I'd like to see a Renaissance of IRC to the detriment of proprietary walled gardens like slack and Discord.
Notes about FoundationDB
That's an absurd interpretation. First, I don't know any startups that aren't paying their employees a cash salary. But the tradeoff always used to be that startups paid somewhat below market (and I'm not talking hugely under-market, usually in the 10-20% range), with a much larger potential upside if the startup was successful.

The problem with that tradeoff nowadays is that in many cases you're just barely breaking even or coming out ahead with what a FAANG can pay even if the startup is wildly successful. The only way that tradeoff will start being worth it again is if founders and VCs give more real equity to employees so they can benefit if the start up is wildly successful.
So there's a "Make Work/Life Balance Key" section with no argument as to how that maximises income and the very next section is "Always Be Working on a Side Hustle". What?

> A side hustle can provide supplemental income while providing you security if something goes south

What kind of money-making side-hustle can layer on top of a 40-50 hr/week job and _not_ negatively impact work/life balance? Pretty unconvincing.
Governments are not corrupt. People are corrupt. This is an important difference because the party in power may be the same but people can change.

Investigations into the corruption of the past are underway, but despite daily revelations in the press it is not something that should be hurried. Justice may take time, but I am optimistic that it will prevail.

It is also somewhat unhelpful to see govt as being intrinsically corrupt because there is no solution to that since govt is a giant faceless blob. If we rather see people as corrupt we can hold those people to account - and yes that takes time. The first step is in changing the people at the top, and at least that has happened.

If nothing else shining a light on the previous administration will make it easier to spot errances in future administration.
can't wait for slack being on target for GitHub

(and not just a team integration please... :D)
Until you mentioned, I didn't even consider that someone might actually have trouble with reading a paper map. I guess these days with location services on your phone, you never need to really find where you are in the first place. You just tap the button to zoom to your location, and go from there.
I appreciate the sentiment but compilers optimizing size (gcc -Os) often produce rather bad full-program performance. Cache and TLB pressure are important topics but in my experience it seems to have been the case that hot/cold code splitting and other layout optimizations overcome the problem, and text on hugepages helps with iTLB miss rate. The best full-system performance I've been able to get on complex C++ servers has always been with really large outputs, 100s of MB of .text.
I've spent many years using Anki and I have thousands of cards. I love it but I notice a few very common failure modes:

1. Putting far too many cards in a deck.

2. Putting in information that you want to learn rather than information you have already learned.

3. Using large pre-made decks (which is really just 1 and 2 together).

If you're planning on using Anki longterm (such as for language learning) then keep the number of new cards low. Something in the range of 3-5 a day is totally fine.

You should put things into Anki after you have learnt them. In general I suggest putting in information at the end of a study session when you feel like you know it so well you couldn't possibly forget it. Cards should feel a bit too easy when you create them. By the time you come to review you will have forgotten a little and the difficulty will be perfect.
The author states:

>"Consequently, on certain Intel architectures, compilers usually do not generate INC/DEC for loop count updating"

They then gave an example of a classic for loop. Can someone explain why compilers don't generate INC/DEC for loop count updating? I'm guessing this is an optimization. What is INC/DEC replaced with?
This couldn't have been posted at a better time for me. I've been talking with some people more in the know on this and was advised by someone to ask for a revenue share in addition to my equity. This person felt the equity offering was low and I should protect myself with a revenue share. Does anyone have resources or additional insight on rev share agreements?
> NN is when you can't get to "Social Media Startup X" because they didn't pay your ISP.

That sounds bad! Any examples of that ever happening before or after NN?
> Obviously you're not going to turn a 6'5'' 300lb man into a believable woman

So now there's a notion of "believable" and "unbelievable" changing of men into women? That kind of completely brings down this entire house of cards now doesn't it?

Think of it from another way. If there's an earthquake and a man pretending to be a woman dies in the rubble, and they discover his remains 50 years from now, do you honestly think that they'll classify him as female? His skeletal structure is masculine, and no amount of pretending or hormones or surgery is going to change it.
The article was written at a time when "polyglot" wasn't common iirc ... to the extent that knowing SQL in addition to a programming language wasn't common.

Today the thinking "keep all domain logic in code" would take you to crazy places given the diversity of systems we need to build applications.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and all that.

If anything it seems more sensible to centralize storage of all business rules in the DB.
Yes... I believe I did :)
The stock is counted as income when it is exercised. The basis is the strike price then, once you sell later it’s considered either capital gain or loss. My understanding is that you can only apply 3000 in capital loses to income tax liability.
E-Commerce Web Design Inspiration
Could you highlight a piece of writing by Matt that appealed to the part you alluded to:

the willingness to entertain the best argument against
your position in good faith.

For example someone quoted this article on Goldman Sachs in previous HN posts off late

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldma...

A clear and even-keeled accommodating of an argument - one very discordant from your own argument - is a rare find these days. People feign even-handedness but what seems a fair shake to them doesnt to others who happen to sit a little further, in the spectrum of opinions.

I want to see if Matt measures up.
I think the Dutch Parliament election process is a step in a right direction. Anyone capable in securing 1/seats percentage of votes gets at least a seat.

The trouble with the EU model of governance is that it's quite a bit too overreaching. Germany has 80M citizens and Greece has 11M. The ods against Greece are 8 to 1. If N. Macedonia would join the EU those ods would be more like 40 to 1. Greece along with Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria should at least make a group like the Visegrad V4 and stick tougether, but sadly it's hard to imagine Greece and N. Macedonia in the same group.
The agreed upon science is that gender dysphoria is a mental issue. No more than a man thinking that he's a dog, he'd be classified as insane.

There can be studies into why some people have this condition, perhaps it could be due to environmental or upbringing reasons, but the solution is not to expect others to dissociate from reality and pretend that that person is the sex he "wants to identify with". It's no different from asking others to treat that person like a dog if he feels like it.
2020 Web Design Trends
I believe the parent comment was saying that AdTech companies were selling peoples' identities to use for fake comments on the FCC website (to, presumably, Comcast/Verizon/etc)
Lawson to open experimental checkout-free convenience store
Are you able to expand on that statement a little?

Your blog post is interesting as always.

But I can't seem to find a reference to biquadratic in either the post or the linked Adobe paper.
> Netflix that pays whatever rate the teleco thinks it can insist on in order to install their CDN in your ISPs hub

No, that’s not a fast lane nor would be stopped by NN. You just explained that Netflix made an investment to get CDNs where they would be effective.

So, I’m still curious to know where these priority traffic fast lanes are.
My point is solar hot water heaters are generally the better option for home heating as I have been saying. You may assume I am referring to a specific case but this is very general advice. Including arctic through tropical climate, sea level or extreme altitude, detached single family homes through skyscrapers, building on bead rock vs oceanfront silt.

In the tropics at high altitude you can use cheap systems for domestic hot water and minimal heating needs. Colder local temperatures require larger and more complex systems but also increase demand for heat. Meanwhile, heat pumps get steadily worse until ground source heating becomes viable though at significantly higher upfront costs and more limited locations. Salt water for example dramatically increases heat pump costs costs vs fresh water.

Large cities often shift things to heat pumps. Though neither system is that great for dense NYC skyscrapers or other large northern cities. And most cites skyscrapers have significant unused exposures where solar collectors are at least somewhat viable. Many short apartment buildings in China for example have solar collectors for the top few floors.

PS: That said, it’s generally not exactly a dramatic difference. However, unlike many things it’s both generally if not always cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
This is analogous to the shift and reset operators from delimited continuations. It's also analogous to branching and cancelation from Chu spaces or the idea of adjoint and norm.

I've been thinking about this a bunch. I put together a brain dump that I improve over time

http://github.com/adamnemecek/adjoint.
How Friends taught the world to speak English (2019)
Well yes, I always yield to vehicles that are already in the intersection, irrespective, again, of their turn signals. Also it is not purely true that "the first to stop is the first to go". Specific minutiae of the law differ depending on region, but generally if I am approaching a 4 way stop with the intent of turning left and another car straight across from me is already stopped and going straight then, while I am waiting for that driver to cross the intersection another vehicle arrives at the stop to my right I am still obligated to yield the intersection to the new car despite having "arrived first". Likewise, when many cars are enqueued at the intersection, turns should continue clockwise, as in most board games, without regard to who is able to zoom up and brake the quickest.
Papers on Convolutional Neural Networks Every Data Scientist Should Read
Having watched people hack together utterly bizarre bash scripts with awk and grep to handle json responses I'd very much agree here.

And before someone raises jq, what % of servers already have python installed vs jq?
That's not how ISOs work. You are taxed on the bargain element (discount to fair value provided by the option) at exercise under AMT, and taxed when you sell under the normal tax rules.

Let's say you worked at Uber and you exercised ISOs at the IPO that had appreciated such that the bargain element at exercise was $1,000,000. You would owe 28% Federal + 7% California = $350,000 under AMT (ignoring a lot of other things for simplicity) in April 2020. When you sell your shares, you will be able to reclaim some of this tax through credits for AMT paid in previous years.

By the time the employee lockup expired in November 2019, the shares are trading 43% lower than the price you exercised at and are only worth ~$577K. You still have a $350K tax bill under AMT due in April 2020.

Because you exercised in 2019, you have an out - by selling the shares in a the same calendar year, you can lower the basis under AMT, but you give up the ability to pay long term capital gains rates on the sale (0-25% fed + 0-13.3% CA) and instead pay ordinary income tax rates (22-43% fed + 0-13.3% CA). Let's just say it would be 40% - you could reduce your tax bill to $231K by selling all of your shares.

You have until the employee trading window closes in mid-December to decide whether to hold onto your shares for the eventual preferential tax treatment, hoping they recover before the tax bill ruins you, or to double your tax rate to save money on taxes this year.

Now, the benefit of hindsight:

If you had sold all of your shares, you would have missed out on $330K in gains in the following 60 days. If you held all of your shares, you are still facing a hefty AMT bill and years of careful tax planning to reclaim the AMT credits you generated. Oh, and even if the shares 10x in value, you are still going to have >$100K in AMT credits that will probably take 10+ years to recover.
Yeah that's fair but that's not a realistic way to view the cost of a finished consumer product.
SpaceX said to be seeking around $250M in funding
> It’s almost impossible for a human to figure out how to handle UNKNOWN correctly. What does UNKNOWN really mean? Should the code retry? If so, how many times? How long should it wait between retries? It gets even worse when code has side-effects. Inside of a budgeting application running on a single machine, withdrawing money from an account is easy, as shown in the following example.

> Figuring out how to handle the UNKNOWN error type is one reason why, in distributed engineering, things are not always as they seem.

How are such UNKNOWN errors handled in practice? The article doesn’t talk much about it.
Guess what? We use oil as an energy storage device. So are you making the argument that fuel/oil is a battery or are you just being pedantic and don’t have a counter the truth that we’re going to use it all - the only question is over what time period.
I've been in that scenario, and honestly I can't imagine why any sane person wouldn't have them convert to NQSOs rather than the true poison of needing to exercise within 90 days. An extremely common scenario:

1. You work your ass off at a startup for years, but even after all those years the company is still not public and the stock isn't liquid.

2. You quit, so you have 90 days to decide if you want to cough up the cash to pay for those options, with no real way to sell.

3. Oh, don't forget the huge AMT bill you'll likely get that year.

4. Pray to God that company is eventually sold for more than all the liquidation preferences of the investors.

Would you rather have that or take the 24-37% potential tax hit (when you can actually sell your shares) vs 15% capital gains.

Also note you can write it so that the decision is totally up to the employee: exercise within 90 days and they're ISOs, after that either lose them or convert to NQSOs.
Sniffex
Fair point. I see the difference between yc and hn... adjusted the logo to fit. thanks!

What do you think of the site and the content?
>but if the stock dropped in value, doesn't the loss in capital offset the taxes? Or has he _already_ paid the taxes, and cannot claw back any losses (since he has to offset those losses on future capital gains from other sources)?

It's the second. But someone getting 7 million in stock options should still be making bank somewhere and can probably offset it in the future. He's not really in that big of a pickle. Ultimately he will work out a payment plan with the IRS and pay it off over a few years.

He's also just an idiot. He should have sold enough stock to cover his taxes when he exercised the options. The people that get really screwed are those exercising options into illiquid companies. They may be paper millionaires as relatively junior engineers and have big tax bills. Then the company goes tits up and they lose everything without a reasonable expectation of future income high enough to offset their paper loss.
You believe that? You don’t know that the first exemption would be military and national security?
Loppi (ticketing system)
Yes, I see what you are saying, but those 'high GDP output zones' are where a ton of the surpluses get created. A million 'happy little towns' won't create a lot of the very specific things we need and depend on for our standard of living to be high. We depend very heavily on 'exceptional organizations' and those things involve inherently greater dedication than many other jobs. For example, I don't think that Tesla would ever happen were it not for the fairly intense work of the leadership there, and they are 'forcing' the market on electric cars. A lot of things behind the scenes like this. Admittedly, on the other hand, a lot of jobs are pushing paper ...
How can you possibly know what the expected value is of selling high price commodities on Amazon?
Natalie Gibson Photo Gallery
Appreciate all your comments here. As someone that knows a lot about this stuff, may I ask... would you have any concerns living near (say 5 miles) from a deep geological repository, like what is described here:

https://www.nwmo.ca/en/A-Safe-Approach/Facilities/Deep-Geolo...
Everyone always asks "why don't well all do this". Well, let me tell you. The system doesn't reward productivity like you imagine it, profit / per time work. It rewards profit / hours. Never mind if working more makes you less productive per the first measure, as long the extra time spent offsets the loss in productivity you will be compelled to do it.

Well, almost. If you are willing to be paid less that helps. But how many people are rich enough to be able make that choice? Enough to change the cultural and mores?

We need UBI or laws to break that. There is no distributed / individual way to escape the baton of the market here.
Right, it's more that founders get sweetheart deals in acquisitions / funding rounds.
> which has had the box opened and then the items re-packed into it as they originally were (in perfect condition, in their original wrap, unused, no fingerprints, etc.)

Sounds like a good way to receive products that failed customer QA, and that the customer can't return themselves for some reason.
Yeah, and it's full of low quality drive-by responses by people using it to build their personal brand. Not quite on the same level as say Quora, SO seems to have better checks in place to keep things from degenerating that much. It's definitely present though, just less overt.
The closer you’re to reality, the better your funnel will be.

If you just make 2 landing pages, sure you’ll know that A is better than B, but don’t expect to convert many of your A’s signups months after when you launch.

So if your intent is to test idea A vs B, go for it. If you’re pretty clear and want to collect initial users, go a bit further.
> Emulation is slow because it is emulating a CISC processor with a RISC processor.

It’s slow because it’s emulating, period. CISC/RISC has little to do with it.
On my website it goes straight to my phone which I do respond to instantly every waking hour which covers about 9am to midnight. I am going to assume for a vast majority of companies you are right, but just letting you know sometimes its real :)
In my experience designing systems like these: There are no hard and fast rules and you handle them in a way that’s been decided on a case-by-case basis for each system. Some messages may need to keep retrying with an exponential back off indefinitely. Others may need to retry only once and then send an email to someone because two failures in five minutes is a critical failure. You also have to design things so that if one failure occurs, maybe it stops the entire process, or maybe other messages can go through still and you just log the failure.

It all comes down to the rules of your business and how critical these systems are. Maybe unknown means “failure” or maybe unknown means “someone should get an alert about this and check it out”.

I think it’s hard because there is no highly visible “crash” that occurs like in a non-distributed system when an unexpected exception occurs and the entire program shuts down. Failures often happen silently and it’s difficult to tell where or why something failed. So you have to design each system with that in mind and figure out how each piece needs to deal with uncertainty.
Let me preface this by saying I believe in AGW, and that it's an existential risk.

> I don't see why this needs to be politicized this heavily

One huge reason is that the coincident ideologies of the left can't be taken seriously by those on the right. Or, put another way, they don't believe them.

Specifically, if one was truly serious about the urgency of solving climate change, they would not simultaneously advocate for raising the standard of living of non-Western populations to Western levels, before the carbon footprint required of said standard of living was dramatically reduced first.

Carbon emission reduction right now, with the urgency required to prevent collapse, is fundamentally incompatible with open borders. So when someone on the right sees an open-borders advocate clamoring for immediate carbon emissions reductions, the conclusion is not necessarily that they don't believe the science, it's that they don't believe you do. And the only valid conclusion is that you're motivated by politics, not by legitimate concern for the species.