skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are different types of authors.

For this author, and many others, the book is somewhat of a loss-leader of some sort: a form of marketing for a consultant, freelancer, aspiring politician, scientist, activist, or similar. PhD theses often work like this, too.

In that scenario, the royalty cheque is sometimes nice, but not considered necessary. If given a choice between, say, ten people reading the book for free versus one person buying it and never getting around to reading it, these authors will always chose the former.

But there is, quite obviously, a different kind: the professional author. GoT wouldn't have happened within George RR Martin's lifetime if he had to teach English or run a really strange cult on the side to pay rent. Many non-fiction authors fall into the same category. James Gleick might be one people here enjoy.

This isn't necessarily a binary distinction. Noam Chomsky, Richard Feynman, or Edward Tufte could have all lived quite comfortably on just their salary as professors and the occasional Nobel prize. But their success as authors drastically increased their freedom, possibly allowing them to take risks in their work they would have avoided otherwise, like talking truth to NASA (and/or capitalism).

As an analogy, consider the not-uncommon offer to work for free on someone's (commercial) software project in exchange for "exposure". This is more common among designers and musicians these days, but used to happen quite frequently to programmers as well. It's exactly the same logic, and not always entirely wrong. Nonetheless, it has become somewhat of a running joke/faux pas/universally recognised sign of a person having no clue of the industry and to be avoided.
One other aspect of approximated numbers is whether the author wants to emphasize that the number is large or small. "Less than" and "almost" carry different connotations.
Talkig of Russell, I can't imagine how he and Whitehead felt when the huge edifice of the Principia Mathemetica simply crumbled away under the onslaught of the incompleteness theorem.
"Free markets, except when the markets do not work" is not particularly specific - I fail to think of any mainstream party in the West that do not agree with this principle. The disagreement is about 1. when do markets fail and 2. what are the acceptable policies to fix it.

For instance, environmental externalities could justify an endless list of regulations, a massive carbon tax and/or cap-and-trade policies, as well as tariffs for countries not complying with environmental regulations. Because the markets does not work. Yet this is clearly not something everyone agrees with, despite being a market drive the economy but intervene to keep them spinning until the (climate) crisis passes.

I do not mean to enagage in politics and suggest the example I gave is what we should or should not do.

My point is that most people beliefs about the economy are a lot more specific than "markets with some intervention".
Well that’s a bit my point. This isn’t really a thing where I grew up, but has become very normalized in the US. Building your resume certainly wasn’t on my or any of my friends mind when we were 16. To me this is insanity. Maybe it’s awesome though, what do I know.
And Friends, Simpsons, Seinfeld etc were things whole families watched together (depending on the kids’ ages of course). Families are not watching GoT and Westworld together en masse. TV shows filled with violence and boobs just aren’t going to be ‘everyone’s seen it’ shows like tamer ones, even if it feels to 20-year-olds like ‘everyone’ has seen them.
This is incredibly pretty and deserves a serious round of applause.

The UI is gorgeous and very usable, the only thing that threw me is when you hover over a line, I wish it would show which country it corresponds to.

With that said I still find a log-log plot much easier to interpret, and so far, the gold standard on trend clarity visualization remains Aatish Bhatia's (https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/). Maybe a way to switch to a similar log/log scale? Otherwise it's very difficult to figure out when a given country approaches the knee.
> I never do any singular thing with the exception of work.

This is the part that misled me. It sounds like that blanket statement doesn’t include deliberate leisure time.
You've fallen for republican propaganda.
Bioluminescent Plankton Lights Up Beach in Acapulco for First Time in 60 Years
"There is no evidence [from rigorous peer-reviewed research] that X is true" and "there is evidence that X is not true" are not the same thing.
I hope these robots know how to break a twenty. Human delivery people can, and vending machines can, so I expect that to be reasonable to implement in delivery robots.

Yet for some reason, I feel pretty pessimistic about this.
I kind of agree, however they are the closest one will ever get like those old platforms.

Waiting for the perfect unicorn will not work out.
Hey, I see you everywhere at least.
Immersive Introduction to Functional Programming, Pure Functions
Lol I spent 5 years in academia, and I have a PhD in CS - I know what I'm talking about. Specs of code change in academia as in industry, I was able to write unit tests and document my code also in academia. And I know in medicine and chemistry time to publish are much longer - but that is not connected with the fact that they know how to properly use a microscope, clean the lab, and keep an inventory.

If you don't write unit tests how do you hedge the possibility of having bugs in your code?
At high school we were not allowed to play games in the computer lab. Liero fit on a floppy disk so we could hide a copy of it on nearly every computer and play it during every break when the teacher was not present in the lab room. Good memories of nuking the hell out of everyone and filling the screen with Zims and watching the poor worms die! :)
A Complete Guide to Man in the Middle Attacks
Non-paywall link for folks who are not privileged enough to have subscriptions to all the publications that matter..

https://outline.com/JWArFB
Like game developers, graphical developers, app developers, actually anyone selling desktop and mobile OS software.

The domain still waiting for Desktop Linux to happen.
Truly ironic that the first comment is a request for a blog post.
“Historically automation has replaced the jobs requiring the least skill with fewer jobs that required more skill”

This is a compelling narrative, but it’s not true. Technological unemployment has not historically accompanied increased levels of automation. There are some economists who project that this will change, but that would be a break with the past.

Probably worth remembering that the current wave of automation struggles to replace jobs we consider “low skilled”, because they actually require high skill (they are impossible to automate with current tech) and are performed for little money (so the capital investment in automation is uneconomic).
Sahara was 'most dangerous place' in Earth's history 100 mn yrs ago: Scientists
factrand.blogspot.com
To be fair, I would do that McDonald’s thing without having ever seen that ad.

They may simply know their market well enough to know that people who tend to do McDonald’s take it as a “different kind of food”.
Urbanization has been going strong as a trend for more than 100 years and I think it's reasonable to assume it won't stop anytime soon. If that's correct, density in cities will only increase, and most remote workers will not be outside of the city anyway. People enjoy having an entertainment-dense area to be in during the weekends and evenings, and they enjoy being able to go there without taking their car for an hour. So even with remote work, I don't think it does much to alleviate the problems associated with urban density.

Remote work is a great idea for many reasons, if nothing else it lessens unnecessary load on infrastructure systems, but having grown up in Europe with the "public transport mindset" I can't help but feel that a society centered around highways, car ownership and isolated suburbia feels almost a bit dystopian.

I believe the future is in cities, and for cities to work people need to be able to get around efficiently without having to each own a separate car that mostly just stands around taking up space and costing money.
That math looks indecipherable. Recommended prerequisites? I'm mostly self taught with minimal academic background
Milan plans to reduce metro capacity to about 1/3 permanently. Talk about learning the wrong lessons here, oof.

This feels like one of those near-sighted decisions that leads to tons of negative knock-on effects.
Interesting to see how did it affect the sales.
I couldn't get v4l2 to work for some in-browser apps. But this one I could: https://github.com/webcamoid/akvcam
Your site is down. You will never amount to anything if you can't keep a 99.999% uptime. Go learn about distributed kubernetes instead of calling kids pathetic here. Shoo!

:)
https://ulisesrmzroche.info/
I would think an honorary one, where a real university gives it to you for your body of work.
I think you have it wrong, there are different types of audiences. It’s not exactly hard to find a free source for learning any tech because there is just so much material out there, and in that environment it’s often better to get paid by people who have liked the work you offered them for free.

I would have never read, or later purchased, the testing goat book for Django if it wasn’t freely available because I would have simply selected another source.

People don’t really do that with fiction because there isn’t 9 million different Harry Potters that are all almost equally good.

A further benefit of having a lot of people read your tech book is that you get more feedback which makes it easier to improve it, and a lot of tech books are really rather terrible until they’ve been heavily edited. And unlike fiction there is often a correct way to do things with tech.
Maybe you can explain what BART and Muni is for those of us that don't live in your local area?
The "car mandatory" suburb sprawls are a huge part of the problem.

Most of them are deliberately deprived of decent public transit, because a segment of people don't want buses and especially don't want trains in/near their neighborhood. The most common explanation I've heard is that public transit attracts the homeless, the poor and criminals.

A lot of suburbs are even designed to prevent walkability for the same reasons, leaving out logical shortcut footpaths and bike paths between streets and cul-de-sacs.

This obviously speaks to a whole host of societal problems and paranoia, to be honest.

With a good local train network with stops in every neighborhood, you could just leave the car at home and not have to worry about parking in the city.
This does not address my points.

- A large chunk of the Fed liabilities are coins and bills. What does it mean for the Fed to "default" on those coins and bills?
That's an accurate argument for why it'd be nice if COVID19 would be not serious. Wishful thinking doesn't make it not serious.

Deaths are telling for who is dead, not for who is at risk of lung damage, compromised immune system, or other consequences.
Legal frameworks frequently change. And ignoring that risk, this is an app that has all those protections because it is explicitly designed to retroactively remove privacy (for a good reason, hopefully). If there is a bug in the software that could be quite damaging.

Plus there are just technical questions. LOVEINT [0] is a genuine concern, and I don't like to imagine what blackmail material could be found out about politicians or powerful figures with this sort of data. An app is one update away from leaking stuff that ought not be leaked.

This is setting up a bad system and a bad precedent, for all that the good intentions today are all probably genuine. They should make the source available.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
My resume when I was 16 (in the UK) was "passed high school exams, did paper round". That was perfectly normal, and I wasn't worried about it how it compared to my peers'.
> Muni does not have arrival times.

This says a lot. (Only transport which is okay without arrival times is one which has 5 min or less frequency)
Flash-based websites. There were some really good ones. I think to this day the fluidity of Flash-based sites can’t be matched. I’m still not sure why the security of Flash couldn’t be addressed. It was a conspiracy to destroy Flash and the HTML-only camp succeeded.
I am communicating daily with a prison inmate and they are required to wear masks all the time. But yes, that won't help due to all the other aspects of prison.
"Road trips in general are firmly rooted in the American experience"

Road trips in Europe don't quite capture people's imagination in the same way as the Great American road trip. I think it might have something to do with driving across borders - it's exciting but also possibly stressful having to drive in a different, unfamiliar country.

Camping is already popular in some European countries. There are lots of camps with modern facilities so its popularity may grow even more.
Thankyou for that, great to see some insight from outside the government and media.
'''Asked outright by Carlton whether the government was now “not going to release the complete source code for the app” as promised by Robert, Hunt, somewhat muddled, replied that the question was a “technical one” and appeared to suggest limits to what code is released may be contingent on efforts “to make sure that nobody else can hack into it.”''' [0]

0:https://www.itnews.com.au/news/health-minister-now-unsure-if...
Ask HN: Is there a sequel to Livingston's “Founders at Work” book?
I enjoyed this book a lot. Is there a similar book with new inteviews of founders (2010 decade)?
Does buying a car really make sense in a Zipcar/Getaround/Silvercar world? The numbers just don't work out IMO. Not once you factor in fuel, maintenance, damage, insurance, interest, car payments and/or depreciation, $300+/month in parking fees and the fact I still have to rent a bigger car if I need to pick stuff up or drop stuff off or shuttle more people. I gave my car to my parents a couple years after I moved to SF and have never looked back.

It's just so easy to get a car in SF whenever you need it for a few bucks -- sometimes in 15 minute increments.
Links to Free Books on Programming
Please add links to free-to-download programming books (or other just a free book you recommend).
I'm trying to figure out what tests they used. PCR is very specific but only works reliably in the early stages and generally has a high false negative rate.

Antibody tests only work after several days of infection, but some of them are not very specific to SARS-CoV2 and therefore have a high false positive rate.

So you really need use both tests, but you can't just OR the results together, because then a faulty antibody test will massively skew the results upward.
Hey, I feel you - and I understand the pressure - i have been in that situation. The point is that this:

> you sometimes have to write an experiment with a deadline next week.

shouldn't happen. And yes, at the moment is like this - sometime you will have to hack. But if the all community start to push for proper practices, instead of just saying "is as it is" - there will be less papers, with more quality.
Higher-Order Perl

https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/
I'm curious to know exactly what the science is behind the tests being performed currently. And how does a body typically fight a virus in the first place?

This might sound amateurish (it is), but I have been picturing this virus and how our bodies are fighting it similar to how our bodies fight cancer. Tons of people who never end up with cancer diagnosis are constantly fighting off cancer cells, it's just that the capacity of their (relatively) healthy bodies exceeds the total # of cancer cells they need to fight off.

Is it possible these tests have become too sensitive to where they're easily detecting the virus in seemingly healthy people?
Eloquent JavaScript
3rd edition

https://eloquentjavascript.net/
Edmund Burke for a Postmodern Age (2011)
> The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials

I wouldn't describe this as exibitionist or even pathological; it's not something that kids are simply choosing to do in a vacuum, but something that they've been encouraged to do all their lives. And it's not an unusual situation historically either. Without careful attention, it's easy for the education system to devolve into something like the Imperial Chinese system, where careful memorization of a fixed set of beautiful but useless classical poetry forms would be required to qualify as a provincial administrator in a system in which the social mobility of adults was almost zero.
Don't worry - in the post-crash automated economy of the future no human will ever have an entire twenty dollar bill to break.
The target audience isn't all Python developers, but specifically data scientists or engineers who work with the PyData stack, to whom Dask is pretty well known.
The immunity that Bitcoin pursues isn't on the user-level. People still need to expect being responsible for the consequences of their transactions.

The immunity that Bitcoin pursues is on the infrastructure / development level, in that the project contributors take great pains to prevent themselves from being subject to regulatory compulsion.
Green Tea Press

Think Python

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/

Think Java

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-java/

Think Raku (How to Think Like a Computer Scientist)

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-perl-6/

Think Stats

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-stats-2e/

Think Bayes

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/

Think DSP

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-dsp/

Think Complexity

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-complexity-2e/

Think Data Structures

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-data-structures/

Think Modeling & Simulation in Python

https://greenteapress.com/wp/modsimpy/

Think Physical Modeling in MATLAB

https://greenteapress.com/wp/physical-modeling-in-matlab/

Think OS

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-os/

The Little Book of Semaphores

https://greenteapress.com/wp/semaphores/

Think C/C++

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-c/
T5 Model – SOTA by Google
The question is how these trends will evolve in the future. The trends in education for example, China has a huge population, it’s hypothetical but do you think US engineering and innovation keep up if it’s then vastly outnumbered in 20 years?
2000-2003 Something Awful was my favorite internet community/site ever. It's too bad about what happened with Ozma and Fistgrrl. Oh well.
Yes, it's called "Free McBoot" and also includes a related variant to be installed on internal HDDs called "Free HD Boot". The system architecture may be a bit quirky, but it's nonetheless more capable than the raw numbers might indicate.
But there was also a lot of capital brought in from outside (which isn't quite the same as a money printing spree that happens everywhere at once) and what was left of pre-war financial elite was more concerned with keeping a low profile and pretending that they were on vacation or something like that for that last ten years than with leveraging their power into an even firmer grip. It's a very different situation and those differences could be very meaningful for the outcome.
That's also shown in the recent outbreak in Singapore - almost all of the cases are migrant workers housed in tightly packed dormitories.
Is this actually true? A US phenomenon or a global one? An appalling failure of medical progress if true.
No, but it's cumbersome.

Let's say your patch doesn't get in in time for Terminator 0.96 (following the same example), or it's not relevant for upstreaming. Now you need to go through the same process again to upgrade. So much for `apt-get upgrade`. And it gets even worse if your change breaks binary compatibility: now you need to find and rebuild all packages that depend on it too!

The beauty of NixOS here is that you patch the "repository" instead, so will get applied on top of the current version as long as the patch applies cleanly. And all of Nix's usual logic applies for rebuilding dependendees as required.
second camera is extra ~$10, plus its so inelegant compared to AI!!1
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/chapter0/
How come? Was that not more readable?
> Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the male breadwinner.

This is US-centric though. The notion of downtown vs. suburbia is the complete opposite in Europe for example, and in many other parts of the world as well. I remember as a kid learning English and learning about the US that it was amazing to me that "downtown" was considered low status and "suburbs" were affluent. Visiting, I was almost amazed to see downtown Minneapolis almost completely deserted on a Friday evening. It made me think of "28 Days Later". In Europe you'll mostly see downtown being the historical, beautiful and expensive part of town while some suburbs are post-war, concrete blocks of public housing.

> So that's where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the suburbs assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one car.

It seems to me that the odd thing, or perhaps not so odd when you consider the era they were built in mostly, is that these suburbs completely lack any city planning in terms of public transporation. As you say, it's a requirement to have a car to even get in and out of the place. The implications of this are many, and often quite weird seen with my eyes -- for example, teenagers are essentially "contained" until they get their own car, or know someone who does. You can't go out drinking without a car because there's no commercial area in the immediate vicinity. But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest suburbs? You wouldn't have to change the suburbs so much as the transport network around them, and perhaps add some local commercial areas to make them slightly more self sustaining.
browsersync is nice but it's just a different approach (proxying for multiple clients/tabs) with its own tradeoffs.

Polypane is one browser tab (1 debugger, 1 css editor, etc) with multiple viewports, so there's no extra hassle or window-management involved when inspecting an element, editing a style, hitting a breakpoint, etc.
So how does the local government pay the police, firefighters, sanitation workers, and wastewater treatment plant workers, since property tax revenue is put on hold?
I think the same goes for technical books. I don't have any source available for this but remember reading blog posts from authors that wrote; compared to the time spent on writing a book, the earnings doesn't justify writing the book for just the income. Rather, you do it for all the side-effects (sans income) of writing a book, exposure and the alike.

Not sure there are people who survive on only writing technical books, usually they have another job and do the book on the side of other things. At least as far as I can gather.
This seems like nonsense. People in big cities rarely go less than a mile. Many are now starting to venture out into forests and similar safe areas for the first time.

On the other hand, a one-mile track in Wisconsin or Montana might be an evening drive.