skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>In these later letters, Wolf sounds like the kind of alarmist digital enthusiasts often deride. After all, they say, reading is not dying; it’s thriving. Wolf herself quotes a study from the University of California, San Diego, showing that an average user consumes 34 gigabytes of data per day—the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words.

How is that the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words? I appreciate people read a lot of text messages, articles, posts, etc. But they don't read 100,000 words worth of those things on average a day by any means. 34 gigabytes of data is also definitely not 100,000 words, more like 5,100,000,000 words or 17,000,000 pages.

Is it based on some 'a picture is worth 1,000 words' argument?

Reading is not thriving. It's hard to find anyone that actually reads books, even if you count reading on eReaders, even if you count listening to audiobooks! People consume a lot of data because they're watching Netflix, YouTube videos and Instagram (and downloading the same JavaScript over and over again on every website).

The whole article is just bizarre. It conflates so many unrelated things and doesn't seem to have any real thesis. People not reading books doesn't really have anything to do with people using phones except for the indisputable fact anyone here will attest to: going back to reading books after not doing so for a long time is really hard. You find your mind wandering, you find it hard to read linearly one line at a time without skipping around, etc. The kind of reading you do of a blog post is totally different from the kind of reading you do of a novel. That people read pamphlets in the 18th century has nothing at all to do with the decline in people reading books today.

I literally have students coming into tutorials that cannot write. They cannot write down answers on paper. They struggle to write (to write!) because they've been told they can just type and never have to write. It's absolutely bizarre, but that's what they're told by their school teachers, apparently. They also can't sit still and read something without getting out their phones. Students complain that their lecture notes aren't put online and they have to actually attend lectures and take notes themselves even though it's been proven again and again that handwriting notes in lectures is much better for information retention and synthesis of ideas than typing or god-forbid not taking notes at all.

Personally, I'm really unsure whether I would even let kids have access to the internet. I had a lot of great experiences online as a kid (I have very fond memories of RuneScape from ages 9-12), and I learnt computer programming online. At the same time, I think you have to be really careful to limit it. It shouldn't be the primary means of entertainment. Mobile devices are probably the main issue: avoid them and at least you can ration and supervise their access to the internet. It can be a tool for research, homework and learning (and fun and games) without the dangers. The mixed messages ("don't share your personal info online" + "put all your personal info online on Facebook and Instagram") are unhealthy and confusing to kids too, I think.
We'll have to see how many tech companies survive the coming depression before we can determine whether the long game at Berkshire is wrong or not :)

Indeed, we'll see if Tesla survives, not only the coincidental depression, but also the multi-hundred-billion-dollar war chest being leveraged against them by the other car companies with a century more experience each, more connections, and broader reach.

It's a bit early to be calling the game is all.
His brief media appearances just doubled down. It wasn't about how he was trying to express himself more clearly. It was about how "the left" was out to sabotage him and tech is taken over by SJWs. The media appearances weren't going to do anything to repair his reputation even if they were on NPR.
Have you tried powerball?
Depends on your definition of "high functioning" and "democracies", I guess.
The following assertion interests me greatly:

> She points out how the “physical and temporal thereness of books” provides a tactile support for the reading circuit’s development that e-books do not, while noting e-books nonetheless continue to spread to classrooms and children’s bedrooms.

Why would this be the case?

Is there a measurable difference between dedicated "paper-like" e-book readers like the Kindle vs. e-books on multi-use digital devices like mobile phones, tablets and computers?
Author of this new PoC here. IPNS propagation is slow in the current implementation and it is a blocker for instant propagation irrespective of number of peers. In my discussion with IPFS developers, I was told that they are going to look into this issue in next versions.
Explain China's complete lack of development until very recently, then.
This is far from a general price cut. It's a price cut only of you are willing to commit to long term usage.
Org mode by default just uses your user agent stylesheet. Adding some CSS is trivial, so just write your own damn styles instead of adding a sandyuraz.com dependency for no reason.

Adding interactivity on the other hand is more involved. I recommend org-info-js which is what I use with my journals. https://orgmode.org/manual/JavaScript-support.html
Most (but not all) of the text is slightly blurry for me on Linux with a HiDPI display at 200% scale, using grayscale antialiasing: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7930239/81491203-4...

I'm using Chromium, but the "-webkit-font-smoothing: none" style doesn't appear to be changing anything.
I remember text editing UIs struggling when the machine was otherwise overloaded.

Although that started happening much more when text editors started to be written in garbage collected languages more often, which I put in the current century.

I still get that today if I use an old machine and/or a fancy text editor.
Maybe we ought to be printing manuals, documentation, manufacturing methods, etc on Tyvek.
Three threads on this already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126517

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127552

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23129216

Not sure this one is going any better. Celebrity frenzy multiplied by pandemic rage is producing as wild a burn as we've seen on HN.

If you're about to comment here, could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html first and make sure what you're about to do is in keeping with the intended spirit of this place? Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"There is no winning play."

That's by design. There's no winning play for the line worker, because providing one reduces the returns for the investors. If it wasn't already obvious before this, the corona response by the US has thrown into sharp relief how stacked the deck is - from top to bottom - against the common worker.
This reads as an extended justification for how the author could possibly have failed. He writes as though it must be as simple as 'just should have asked a question'. It's an odd conclusion which communicates its own set of assumptions. It reminds me of people who claim, in all seriousness, that they can always spot X intangible characteristic — without any justification for how they determine their false positive/negative rate in that judgment. This undoubtedly reflects my bias, but I find many (bordering or even definitely including most) 'humble' blog posts to do this; and that is perhaps a further riff on the kind of canned advice we see here. They tend to read, to me, like answers to the interview questions, "Tell me about a time you failed," or, "What is your greatest weakness?" In this case, all the author really reports is that he did extremely poorly relative to his expectations — but he manages to spin it into a maxim. If even someone as qualified as he could be unseated by this tactical error, it surely bears memorializing as advice worth living by.
> There's literally no way to know what would have happened if no lock down happened.

Actually, we do have data.

The SF Bay Area has very close ties to China, and corona likely arrived here via air travel in mid-Dec.

So anybody who actually wants to make the effort can compare before and after lockdown effects.

Also, it's common in large organizations for one dept. to not communicate to another dept. in a meaningful way, so relying on epidemiologists alone for analysis is not wise. There has to be daily, open conversation with local govt. and economists.
He says its coded in lua but it seems to be completely coded in C ?
That's interesting because the recent arxiv paper[1] by Heidi Howard indicated that Raft just has a clearer presentation rather than some technical superiority of being simpler (discussion here [2]). So perhaps people who believe in Paxos need to come up with similarly easy explanations for the community that learn from the presentation that Raft focused on?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22994420
AWS bandwidth fees make a multi-cloud infra a less likely design or migration choice by their customers, leading to lock-in.

> Service providers may attempt to “lock in” customers to prevent them from switching to alternative products, technologies, or suppliers. Customer lock-in involves raising customers’ switching costs to the point that the cost of switching outweighs the potential benefits from switching.

http://www.ictregulationtoolkit.org/toolkit/2.2.3.6
I imagine it could have something to do with the physical fixedness of a book. I can remember the positions of the line breaks in some of my favourite books as a child and it wouldn't surprise me if the physical layout of the words on the page (and how far through the book you are) somehow factored into the way the brain stores the memories of reading the book.

With an ebook you have the same little device with exactly the same dimensions for every book (no memorable covers or different formats) and there's no physical indication of how far through the book you are. And you can change the font size.
It is interesting to consider what the death toll from exporting American food culture worldwide is. I think it would really help put the death toll from corona virus in perspective.
See this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127741
These tiny isolated DC to DC converters are amazing.

When you think that they can withstand kV, some for minutes at a time, it's pretty impressive engineering, all in a tiny form-factor that still manages to be highly efficient and avoid over-heating.

I'm amazed by the knowledge that goes into making these, all the various disciplines that need to work together to make these tiny devices...
Do you own products from companies that take part in illegal, corrupt, or morally questionable acts? My point is not to shame you, my point is to say what Tesla does is just not close to the behavior of traditional car companies, oil companies, or many Chinese manufacturers that make your favorite gadgets. It's just that Elon is a twat at times because he is obviously emotionally unstable.
Great stuff, cool project. Could you share a few thoughts on your language and transpilation approach?
In double deck, or 6? You can join any time at 6 deck.
The DSM considered homosexuality an illness until 1973. That’s problematic because nothing really changed in our understanding of homosexuality. It just became more accepted culturally. That makes it hard to argue in favor of the strict scientific rigor of the DSM.
The next step is emulating a CRT monitor to get the fundamentally analog nature of the display right: Even if the computer thinks in pixels, it was still ultimately controlling a complex analog waveform being sent to some number of electron guns steered by magnets. Higher-resolution later computer monitors came closer to imitating pixels, but analog TV didn't try; it just had lines and interlaced fields. Old games took advantage of the analog nature of TVs to smooth over their graphics:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786
I'm wondering if this is to support small businesses/startups in the light of Covid19. I know they amazon and google are already giving covid19 discounts to companies but that won't cut it. I personally know so many startups who are looking at their huge server bills and won't be able to survive for long if that pricing continues. A failed startup is just one less customer for cloud companies. So could this new pricing be to to keep existing small/medium customers ? Just a thought. What do you guys are experiencing around ?
Video Star
Good point, but unfortunately on a lot of vendor sites, the checkout experience is still sub-par, some require you to create an account (Annoying if you know it's just a one-time purchase). On amazon, it's click and done. The shipping delays aren't universal; I recently ordered coffee from there and it it got delivered within 2 days (prime customer).
The title was "Will the Lego City Deep Space Rocket Go into Deep Space?" when this was posted. We changed it to that of the article.
> Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc

In which language do you code?
EE here. I agree with most of your guesses as far as layout goes. There are definitely some diodes in there - the devices with a more square aspect ratio and large square contacts in the middle.

The large power transistors are laid out in multiple "fingers" so current is distributed among them. This both reduces the effective diffusion resistance and alleviates concerns related to electromigration.

There are a lot more guard rings than I'm used to seeing, and they're very wide. This is probably to avoid latchup due to the potentially high switching currents, and possibly also for moisture protection ("seal rings" would be on every metal layer in addition to the front end layers).

There's one very odd layout structure that has me puzzled. In your "collection of transistors", the top left image has a non-rectangular structure in the middle. I wonder if there was a metal structure there that required a diffusion opening. Or maybe its a BiCMOS BJT?
distance learning is absolutely not working. parents need to work and can't let their kids stay home alone. nor can they get work done if they want to work from home with kids around.

yes, this is solveable, but it will take time. the pandemic needs to rage for several more years before a change in behavior can be normalized
With the pedo thing he seems to have believed it for better or worse, and there's no law against a CEO commenting on their stock price if it's not misinformation and they aren't trading on it. The 420 bit was obviously a joke.
Ask HN
What are some blogs you guys are reading these days? Any content similar to gwern!or melting asphalt?
I feel the need to disagree with you here, it's absolutely possible a candidate just doesn't have any questions, maybe they've done their research up front, or all their questions were asked during the interview, I wouldn't necessary correlate that with curiosity.
I've been in interviews where I had some questions up front, but they all got answered during the interview itself, either through natural conversation, or because the person interviewing touched on those topics.

> The question will be the same, the answer will be different.

Personally, especially when I know I'm having different interviews with different people, I ask the same question twice, just to evaluate their answers. If the answer to a question (e.g. Do engineers have a lot of input regarding technical decisions) is different between one of the engineers and the dev lead / CTO, then you know there's something wrong.

Especially at bigger companies, where I know the final interview will be with HR, it's interesting to ask questions regarding company policies or culture. You usually get very different answers.
That's not very fair, since I could make the exact same argument about the the government's actions on this issue. Lockdowns didn't just threaten to destroy jobs -- they did destroy jobs. Calling out Elon Musk for making a decision that would do the same provides no contrast.

On top of that, Elon Musk is trying hard to get his workers back to work. If it means moving to a new state where workers are actually allowed and afforded work, it would be a net gain for the workforce.
A cold look at decentralized finance mass adoption: the Great DeFi Filter
This is what I say every time; and combined with that, I want to be able to use different ActivityPub software all from my own domain. I don’t want to run Mastodon at foo.chrismorgan.info, publish blog posts via ActivityPub at bar.chrismorgan.info, handle videos at baz.chrismorgan.info, &c. I just want to be me@chrismorgan.info (I’ll settle for @me@chrismorgan.info if I must) everywhere.
Women started being excluded once computing was considered a "serious" career path and salaries ticked up. Before then serious engineering was mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics.

Sexist (and racial) exclusionary behavior ticks up once a field becomes commoditized and the general populace move on in, because the general populace carry with them the prevailing attitudes of the times.
This line from the article really caught my attention:

> In sum, Wolf says, the paper reading brain has better memory, more imagination, immersion, and patience, and more knowledge than the screen reading brain.

I've been torn for years about how to feel about my reading and writing habits. I love reading physical books, especially when I'm trying to develop a deep understanding of some topic, and I have, at times, made concerted efforts to take notes on paper and keep my daily schedules and to-do lists in notebooks. But at the same time, I love reading the articles and other types of content that are surfaced by users here and on other sites.

I can't be certain (could just be confirmation bias of some sort), but I personally find that what Wolf said in that line is true. When I read and write on paper, I feel like I have a deeper connection to what's there and am more able to reason about it. Reading and writing on a computer feels more detached, like I'm just consuming the content without understanding or just dumping out ideas without thinking.
I thought it was a truly novel speculation on encountering nonhuman intelligence in the cosmos that challenges our most common fantasies about space exploration. I know I’m guilty of anthropomorphizing intelligence because that’s a lot easier than considering that it may come to us in incomprehensible forms, so I was generally impressed how well he was able to portray that— devising the actions of a nonhuman intelligence is almost a paradox.

I can see how the dry digressions (which I personally enjoyed) and lack of resolution could rub some readers the wrong way, but I found the philosophical questions it raised valuable, not to mention the mystery and human interest woven between it all. There are of course other works with this kind of thought experiment (like the movie Arrival and the short story it’s based on), but I find Lem’s pessimism refreshing.
Right, asking the question is another stress issue with interviews, during the interview you are essentially hunting around for questions to ask this representative of a company that is pretty much like every other company in the tech space for all they like to pretend that they are not. Because at the end of the interview they are going to ask if you have any questions for them, and despite everything being pretty clear cut and boring you should try to find some question that makes you sound insightful and makes an impression but at the same time is not aggressive.
I think where you are in the book as you read along is another sensory impression that can form stronger memories about the book's contents.

I always have a sense of where to go back to to refresh some old ideas if my memory gets blurry. Knowing how far into the book it was already aids my recollection.
I think all these points are valid. As someone who spent the first 30 years of my life reading physical books, the transition to e-books has been difficult for a lot of the reasons you mention.

I wish the author was more specific on what "reading circuit development" means.

The frustrating thing about e-book reading devices is how slow they are. Flipping to the table of contents or flipping around the book just doesn't work. Mobile devices, tablets and computers are faster, but the experience still isn't as good a physical book. And then there are distractions.
Was a bit skeptical, but this is surprisingly fast & lite & supports multi-tab + tree view + syntax highlighting in a 1mb download. I've not seen any of the reported issues with the font which looks clean & crisp (on Win 10).

I'm not expecting it to have any of the features I'm used to with VS Code or JetBrains products, but it's definitely going to replace notepad.exe for a fast look at any text file.

Supports `lite <path>` to open any file/folder, e.g. `lite .` opens up the current folder in a tree view with beautiful dark mode by default, single click on each file loads it instantly. Seeing beautiful, matte-style syntax highlighting for all popular formats I've tried: .html, .css, .js, .md.

Perfect minimal distraction-free editor for writing docs.
Google China's "century of humiliation". China was the world's biggest economy until the 1870s. Here's just one chart showing it. This is well known to everyone who has studied economic history.

http://urbanlogics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/share-of-gd...

You could have asked your question with more humility and less abrasion. Just because you don't know about a topic doesn't mean there isn't reams of research about it.
A lot of what needs to happen, IMO, is culture change. Doing all of the things you mentioned is only a drop in the bucket, but one person putting in that effort normalizes it. That makes other people feel more comfortable and motivated to do the same. It might not feel like much, but it's definitely better than nothing.

Also, if you're in tech and you have the luxury of changing jobs, there are companies doing good work on climate change. Electric vehicles, solar power, making production and supply chains more efficient, etc. We can make it easy/cheaper/more pleasant for people/corporations/governments to make the right choices.
Elon plays fast and loose with his opinions in public discourse, but generally when Tesla makes an official move like this it seems to be more thoroughly considered by a larger group of people than just Elon. I have the same gut feeling that you seem to have when I first hear these stories, but the associated press releases seem to consistently have concrete foundations that I don't initially expect.

In this case, they point to their experience dealing with exactly this process in Shanghai, and running the Gigafactory over there for 3 months successfully since reboot. That gave me pause - they've seen this and dealt with it firsthand already, which isn't something nearly anyone commenting on this can say. Maybe they're lying, but that feels like a pretty serious unearned accusation.

I think everyone agrees that we should restart businesses if it's reasonable to, but it doesn't seem like anyone is evaluating what "reasonable" means outside of "what the local government is saying". And then you have to wonder why we're suddenly assuming the state/city government is competent in this case.

I don't know where I stand, but I know that I'm not assuming Tesla is in the wrong here. I know far less than they do and it would take a miracle to convince me that the local government is properly thoroughly evaluating the situation and making nuanced, reasonable decisions (as opposed to simply reacting to the political environment). It's increasingly difficult to figure out how to proceed, but at some point we have to decide that we're able to open businesses back up (with safety measures that we decide are adequate). It's scary, but we can't just wait around for a vaccine forever - it could be years out.

It's just a fundamentally hard problem.