skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take any large multivariate problem and look for a regressor against some dimension. Say, car speed. You will find that there is a good variable that links that. But that variable won't be explanatory or even correct.

A much better explanation here, from the fairly wonderful blog of cosma shalizi
http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

And most importantly, it won't be predictive.
>I still need to be able to outbid other buyers who might have no qualms about taking on an unaffordable debt

It's still not the bank's fault that people will voluntarily enter unsustainable agreements because they think they need to live in overpriced areas. The banks in this scenario are merely an accessory to financial suicide.

So I think my point still stands: how do we break up this obsession with living in overpriced areas? Improved remote work opportunities? Better cultural opportunities outside major metropolitan areas?
Classic 8-bit computing the Atari way
If it's not (1) then it's not Dunning-Kruger. Credentialism is a different fallacy (argumentum ad verecundiam). Saying we should flatten the curve for all deficits of critical thinking is reading something into the article that's not actually there, no matter how worthy you or I might believe such an effort is.
I agree, that’s all solvable. But “we can make this work” is quite different from “you want this”.

Credit cards work just fine for me, I’m even rewarded 1-5% for using them. I can’t see why I’d want to switch over to this and deal with the nightmare it would make my book keeping, not why my barista would want it over cash or credit card.
I've not tried out Ghost yet - I thought it was suppose to solve WP's bloat and UX issues.

What was nightmarish about Ghost and when did you last use it?
It made total sense to include emojis in Unicode initially.

And a great idea to put them outside the 16-bit plane, so platforms would be forced to support characters beyond the BMP because of the public demand for emojis.

But I think going forward, emojis should be handled outside of Unicode. They are really small illustrations rather than characters or symbols.
This one happened last night. A student contacted me because her Anaconda Jupyter notebook (installed on her laptop) just wouldn't connect to the Python kernel. (The notebook itself would load, though, meaning that the server was running fine. It's just that the kernel and its websocket was failing.) I should point out that, because of COVID-19, this troubleshooting was over Zoom, which complicated the diagnosis a bit.

She had not been using Jupyter for several months, as we have been writing stand-alone programs in class using Spyder (the editor that comes with Anaconda), and the command line, and Jupyter had worked the last time that she tried it.

We restarted everything, and still the problem was there. I helped her to update everything, but that didn't solve the problem.

Finally, I looked at the error messages in the console where the Jupyter server is running. It had a huge list of errors, all relating to the pickle library.

We had done an exercise with pickle in the class, but nobody had reported a similar problem. When we looked in her classwork directory, though, we saw that she had created a "pickle.py" file when she was testing something with pickle. But, at that point in the class, we were working in the command line, and everything (including Spyder) still worked just fine.

Evidently, this was the cause of Jupyter's problem. When trying to start the Python kernel in Jupyter, it imported pickle, and evidently it imported her test file rather than the actual library. The fix was simple: we renamed her test file, and everything worked perfectly.
As lockdowns lift, new hazards lurk in the water
If you just want to write and could care less about ownership of content, pick Medium.
Jepsen: Dgraph 1.1.1
By absolutely worthless I mean it’s a meaningless calculation. They take the actual change averaged out over a quarter, and then assume 4 more quarters will have exactly the same thing happen.

It’s a common calculation used to make quarterly numbers seem more important, but it’s at best misleading if not actively deceptive.
It is many things, but started as more of an architecture for user-data interaction, where the data is in a computer system - and the user wants to interact with it (the user in user-model-view-controller unfortunately fell off at some point).

See:

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html

As for where something like redis fits - I don't think it'd show up on the design that concerns mvc, no (it could be a cache inside model, inside controller - or even inside view.. Caching ui fragments for example?).
Keep in mind that some of that output is only there because of planned obsolescence.
Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox
Toilet Paper Is on the Way
Matters for whom? For a lot of use cases (web servers, compiling, databases...) having lots of cores matters (and total = performance of core * number of cores), for others it doesn't.
Depends on workload, and we've seen that with the latest round of AMD offerings. As a gamer, yes, but that's really it.
Sure, that would be the ideal. But a lot of parents either don't have the skills or the willingness to do it. My parents had neither and I struggled with social issues all the way from childhood up to early adulthood, until I accidentally found good resources and support.

Parents are not superheroes that know it all or can do it all.
Are we witnessing the death of the car?
Vimeo

BitChute
I'm not sure if you're looking at large organizations or what, but where I've worked in the midwest (one company with less than 100 employees and a startup with 5), both have had software engineers/developers older than 40. In fact, we sometimes hired people that were specifically older with more experience at the company with less than 100 employees.

Maybe you just need to tune which companies you look at and/or lower you salary expectations. I'm not sure honestly. Just thought I'd try and give you my experience.
I keep a blog at https://vorpalhex.com and I primarily keep it as a repository of thoughts, ideas and odd projects.

I use Hugo because it's simple yet flexible, powerful and produces a static bundle that is easily hostable anywhere. I use the `hello-friend` theme with significant tweaks, mostly a lot of shortcodes for better and more-responsive friendly image handling. I wanted a markdown based flow with minimal JS that didn't require node/rails/etc toolchains. Hugo is available both as a docker image and a small compiled binary so both local builds and CI builds are very easy. Currently I'm hosted via Gitlab for ease (I can use my own CI runner and the hosting itself is free with SSL support) but I've used S3 and others with great results.

I do my drafting in my favorite notes app InkDrop, and then just take my markdown file and drop it into my repo. One git push and it's published. Still haven't found a great platform to let non-technical folks edit my posts though.

I keep my images and big files in a Digital Ocean CDN. I use rclone to manage cdn contents (it uses the s3 protocol) and have some utility scripts to pull the cdn locally and then sync up changes. I ended up having to write a small golang program to easily bulk resize images at responsive breakpoints: https://gitlab.com/vorpalhex/responsimg

For me, this setup makes it very low friction to compose blog posts and get them published and it gets good lighthouse speed scores and loads quickly on even low end devices with bad connections. No medium paywall, no facebook SDK, etc. I did end up caving and installing Google Analytics (I was very displeased with piwik).
Art on the Blockchain
It's unlikely that this went entirely unnoticed for 4 years, and I would guess that when the problem was understood, someone did the math on staying the course, versus starting over or reversing course.

And after all the internal calculations were complete (which factor in way more than technical effort by a small dev team), they intentionally stayed the course.

This is probably an extreme example because an internal wiki that is used company-wide will have an incredibly complex and hairy stakeholder matrix (both business and technical), which means consensus is very challenging.

At some point the cost of the meetings required to work out a solution (both in time spent, and in time not spent on core work by the stakeholders) probably exceeds the cost of just letting a small team brute-force their way through a bad solution.

Cost here isn't just money, it's focus, morale, disruption, conflict, risk, etc..

Keep in mind that you have the benefit of hindsight, and the comfort of looking at it from the outside, with a very incomplete picture of all the constraints and pressures at play.
Rob Pike interview
Gotta pay for those basketball and football programs somehow. (Yes, SOME athletics programs are net positive - most are not)
HST data and modeling reveal a planetesimal collision around Fomalhaut
It's only a file encoding if you do it per file, but that removes a lot of the advantages of sharing and minimising the recovery data. PAR is usually across multiple files/blocks, but then you've got to manage this extra data when any part of any of those files/blocks changes. The more complete/parallel your recovery data is, the more you need to update on even a small change to one file.

There'd be all sorts of ways to make it more efficient, but it would take some analysis to work out the best trade-offs.
Thanks for the suggestion.

I've been a long time user of a Lenovo X1 first generation, and this time I would like to see if perhaps I can't break away from Lenovo...

My main issue with Lenovo is their keyboards and pricing. The keyboard on the X1 (which is the same as in the current generations) is too brittle, and I had to replace three of those in the course of 5 years... Also I swapped 2 coolers... I know (hope?) that the T-line is more sturdy.

That being said, unfortunately the T480 doesn't have an SATA port, which is a deal breaker for me, as I value above all else being able to quickly swap my SSD from one laptop to another.

(When the X1 I had finally gave up it's second cooler, switching to an same generation Fujitsu was a simple matter of going to the store, buying a refurbished laptop, and swapping the SSD.)
I'm going to build my opinion on the software on whatever version they claim is officially supported for my machine.

If they don't want to do a good job supporting the OS I run then don't support it, or call the support a beta version and have an easy user flow to get to the web client or something.

Otherwise yea, I'm going to call a spade a spade and say it's bad software when it doesn't work as intended as an official release on an officially supported target.
If you're still "active" on the computer it notifies you there and doesn't think it needs to also reach you on mobile. But I think you can set your mobile notifications to notify anyway.
Thank you for the recommendation.

Do the authors address cryptocurrencies specifically?

I skimmed some reviews. I gleaned that this is a pro-austerity book, that the author's conclusions were largely debunked by independent analysis of their data.

Given this is true, does this book's treatment of cryptocurrency remain useful?
This is indeed an incredibly dismissive view, only seeing the SRE as the poor soul you offload responsibility of things running well in production, despite the fact he is likely to have far less insight on what might go wrong and means to fix things.

Being basically in this position (but in a large follow-the-sun team, so I'm fortunate enough to not be paged at night), I can only underline the deep frustration such views can generate. Being paged every 10 minutes, being asked to fix things you have no control over, getting answers like "what? the server is overloaded? it's an infrastructure issue, not a bug in our code" and seeing developers cry when they get a ticket a day, when at the same time each SREs in the team is receiving a dozen, it can lead to some resentment.

A saner approach is to have the SRE as the first line to filter bugs/alerts/tickets out, but being able to call a developer if required. The SRE can also be an active team member with more insight on production constrains and pain points and maybe system architecture recommendations for the whole team. Also, in my opinion, developers should be an active part of running things in production, otherwise the whole dev team can lose touch with reality and lose sight on how well or not things are actually running.
Developing with Elixir/OTP Course Review
Why are we gamifying relationships?

Making friends is a mission? C'mon

I can't imagine where will this lead us.
This has very much been my experience. I used to be the young guy. Now I'm the middle aged guy. I work with all kinds of developers older than I am all across the embedded software industry.The oldest guy on our team is in his 60s. It helps that tried and true technology which still underpins everything else (C, POSIX, sockets, serial comms) doesn't drastically change with every new hype and trend. Sure, it changes and will change but in units of decades. The next airplanes aren't going all Rust any time soon. And even cutting edge companies like Tesla/SPACEX need old school C programmers. And when/if it goes all Rust or something else, I don't think us old guys are going to have too much trouble switching over, and the ones who do can spend all their time maintaining legacy systems. In other words, I don't see how I (in my early forties) could outlive my usefulness.
I am using a self-hosted Wordpress instance, lets encrypt, and cloudflare to proxy requests. A few automation scripts to ensure the apps are updated and IP changes are corrected with google domains. Every now and then I check my site to ensure everything is working as it should.

Granted, it doesn't get much traffic except for 2 post that gets me 5-10 visitors daily. https://ianmf.com
peertube?
The gap is pretty small, even now, and Zen 3 comes out in a few months.

The value proposition of these chips is pretty bad, as well. Enormous power and cooling requirements, short-lived motherboard sockets, and sheer price/performance ratio are all not great in comparison.
If you’re interested in short stories To be published I recommend trawling The Submissions Grinder. This is duotrope but free.
Renewables are cheaper than all other forms of generation [1] (yes, rooftop solar is more expensive, but most renewables being installed in the US are utility scale). Oil does not compete with renewables.

Coal is rapidly falling out of the mix [2] [3] [4], and natural gas is complimenting renewables due to its firm dispatchability and throttling speed (evening duck curves). As soon as the price of natural gas spikes, battery storage becomes incredibly attractive financially (its already attractive enough to replace the most expensive single cycle gas peakers).

Electricity when the sun is shinning and the wind is blowing will be incredibly cheap (1-2 cents/kWh), and you’ll end up paying a premium (6-8x multiplier) if you need power when renewables aren’t generating (and your power comes from natural gas or batteries). Market forces working as intended.

Google shifts compute to when and where is the most environmentally friendly based on renewables generation [5], powered in part by Tomorrow/electricitymap.org [6] [7]. Expect to see more large electrical consumers take similar actions in the future, further increasing the rate of renewable deployment. You’ll also see electric vehicles charging when renewables are producing, using market price signaling.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/austria-shuts...

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-coa...

[5] https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center...

[6] https://www.tmrow.com/

[7] https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...
"Elaborate processes" and "closely scripted, narrowly defined workflow" aren't adjectives I'd ever use for agile done well. And I've been doing it since we were allowed to call it eXtreme Programming. There's lots of "Dark Scrum" out there. Sounds like those are your experiences. They're not mine.
Restoring sight in mice by turning skin cells into light-sensing eye cells
Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say
Take a bike or train. Or both. It's ridiculous the rest of us have to suffer because people don't want to knock knees with others.
I love seeing new implementations of popular languages.

Curious: Did implementing this in Rust expose any bad or interesting behavior when replicating the Erlang language spec (https://github.com/erlang/spec) or whatever reference implementation you were targeting?
It's only possible to use it in a text message because it's a unicode character. If external link was a character, would people use it? I don't know. Do you?
You can stick a proxy in front of apps that don't have features you need like mTLS, tracing, metrics, etc. to get those. Google "service mesh" to explore that space. But to some extent, I think it's all a bit easier if your apps just do the right thing out of the box. Less moving parts. Better integration testing.

Like medicine, every piece of software you use has effects and side-effects. If the advantage of the effects outweigh the disadvantages of the side-effects, then something is a good deal. But if you can avoid the side-effects entirely, that's best.
>In math, when assuming the existence of something proved a contradiction, we conclude that the thing does not exist.

Well only to the extent that you don't want to throw away any of the other axioms. Sometimes you do and there are some fun systems of math, but few have any practicality and those that do are often so advanced that even someone with an undergraduate focus in math can't appreciate those systems.

It is much the same with computer science. I personally enjoyed playing around with formal concepts of computation and adding some extras to see what happens. For example, what happens to a Turing machine if part of the machine can time travel or has access to an oracle. Does this make concepts like time travel inherently contradictory to our notion of computation?

But the practicality of these exercises does not exceed their entertainment value.
Serious question: have you considered writing for just yourself?

I've found in this age of online sharing my motivations and enjoyments of things is more pure if I just do it for myself, and maybe share with one or two appreciative people.

In addition, I find that not telling anyone your goals or ambitions is extremely underrated. There's research that shows that if you do that, you get some of the reward for having done something worthwhile without nearly as much of the work, so the actual work becomes harder to do. And personally, I find it's absolutely true. The rest of the world's noise and opinions interferes with my own developmental process.

If I do things for myself and only for myself, it usually goes so much better.
I expected those graduates would have tech degrees, rather than "I picked up programming a few years out of college".
ELI5: Why does renewables go down with oil? How are they linked economically?
Would be nice to see more competition, but not because of prices or selection but because we want small nice-guys/girls to have a significant presence. If google and other huge companies are the competition, it doesn’t really improve that

Shopify is cool for that: enables a ton of tiny online businesses to thrive
I use Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/) since 3 months ago. I used Evernote for many years, but ended up with lots of notes that I never read again, because it wasn't simple to link them. Roam is better because instead of a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Evernote, it is built on top of graphs and bidirectional links.
This article just seems to be saying:

- Jobs are being cut in the oil industry

- Unemployed workers are looking for other jobs in energy

It's sort of broadly gesturing at the idea that this is a sign of renewables overtaking fossil fuels—something most of us would love, obviously—but it's not really a part of the article's core.
My kid will be making his college choice in the coming year. As such, he's getting mail from colleges pretty much every day. The mailer from Vanderbilt really struck me as to the wrongheaded thinking of university leaders. On one side was this amazing blurb:

"Vanderbilt financial aid packages DO NOT INCLUDE LOANS.
IT'S FREE MONEY....65% of Vanderbilt students received some type of FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE"

Tell me why college pricing makes shopping for a car look simple, even by pre-internet standards.
Oh, so expensive private education is only sustainable in a hyper-inflated economy? That's sarcastically unexpected.
I think this is fully explained by 48 Laws of Power, Law #1: Never Outshine the Master. How is it in the best interests of a 30yo engineering manager to hire someone older than him? His best interest is to expand his command using the only way he knows for sure will work which is to hire younger versions of himself.

PS if you just need a job try the huge government contractors
You are still way better off with college than without. It’s not as good a deal as it used to be but it’s still the best deal available.
Ask HN: What can I build for you?
Hi HN, I'm currently working as a Professor in a local college where I teach Operating Systems and Distributed Computing courses. However, I'm kind of bored and would like to build a side project to try to earn something on the side.

So, what do you need? What can I build for you? I'm looking to build something like a SaaS, maybe an API.. What are some of your pain points? My target are probably other developers, or students, or other teachers, people that I can relate to..
Or does it point to the right because a new tab will open, to the right of the current one?

Come to think of it, are tabs aligned toward the right side when the browser/OS is set to an RTL language?
The triggers considered were 0.2 deaths / 100k population / week and 1.6 deaths / 100k population / week. For the U.S. that corresponds to ~700 deaths / week and ~5,200 deaths / week.

The United States as a whole hit the first trigger (according to reported deaths from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv) sometime around 3/19, and second trigger sometime around 3/27.
Here is some data on travel and transit in New York: https://visitdata.org/bydatesel/New%20York/New%20York/Travel...

Can you detect the lockdown, which took effect at 8PM on Sunday, March 22?
It's completely logical that engineers have professional deformation.

Society is in crisis and there are metrics. How can you realistically expect engineers not to start debugging and interpreting the metrics?

Yes. Engineers aren't medical domain experts, but the experts and/or political leadership failed. The models are not being shared. The process isn't transparent, nor optimized for quick interventions based on incomplete information. And claims and policies differ around the world. There is no consensus among the experts.

The truth is, engineers might have more experience in how to operate during a crisis like this. How to quickly asses risks in a world of incomplete and sometimes contradictory information.

I wish the real experts were more convincing in their abilities. But in the west this is the first time they deal with this kind of situation while it not being a hypothetical. They is their first real experience with it as well.
The external link symbol also has meaning when written on papaer, which is "external link".
I didn't realize that. Do you have a source for this, please?
Type-Level Programming in Rust
Rising CO2 Levels May Trigger Cognitive Impairment, Says New Study
That's either a rather funny answer or a very sad one.