skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to improve my abstract thinking?
A few days ago I got into Mathematical Logic[0] and learned how to reason about
problems through using various branches of mathematical ideas like
proof theory, model theory e.t.c.

I found this abstract way of thinking about problems clear, & organised.
"Mathematical Logic" is diffrent from the kind of Math I was taught,
which was a top down approach to solving problems.

"Mathematical Logic" seems to be able to derive solutions to problems in
a ground up fashion where a solution can somtimes elegantly present its self
as long as you apply correct mathematical properties.

What other techniques do you hackers use to improve your abstract thinking?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic
"the one about increasing human intelligence with magnets is pretty far out"

Sounds very esoteric to me. Is there a link somewhere? I would like to know, if there is substance to it, or that someone was able to talk quite good.
Steam isn't a monopoly though. They don't force exclusivity on their games and many Steam games can be purchased elsewhere (like on GOG).
This is another article where the author goes on a flight of fantasy about how these services work. He conflates public good with public provision. He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of detailed decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers).

I think this is a perfect example of the sort of wooly and confused thinking behind break up X articles. To some extent that's inevitable as no one knows what parts of big businesses make money (the author thinks this is intentional opaqueness but its actually very difficult in a big business to determine who "makes" a profit). But if he really wants to convince people to enact massive change like this, he needs to do better.

People need to be clear what they are doing by first being clear what they want to achieve and what the side effects will be. If you want privacy, ask for privacy, and admit that that has costs. Trying to get privacy by smashing Google by dividing it up in ways you know don't work isn't privacy, it's just wrecking a service lots of people need.

Similarly, the author isn't upfront about the costs. Are you willing to switch to a Gmail equivalent that costs 50usd a year? Is the average third world user willing to pay the same to have an email address? Do you want to go back to US government issue maps full of errors with no guide to what's in any of the buildings?

I'm not willing to do that. I'm actually very pro privacy and anti-advertising but we need a practical working solution. These pieces are the equivalent of luddites saying we should close the Mills and go back to making everything by hand.
> youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a copy.

Who has the domain is not a small problem...
This was exactly my experience with my last side project, the standard PH, HN, indie hackers channels didn't work at all but niche subreddit communities worked really well. I now write updates about my progress in my projects own subreddit which has it's own followers.
Oh the ctrl-left trope we are only fighting unconscious biases. Is fighting the unconscious biases like Don Quixote fighting the wind mills or more like repentance for the original sin your born with?
In Lockdown, Mathematicians Crack a Stubborn Geometry Riddle
This is really amazing and takes me back.

Very funny seeing it on such a small format in the top right corner.

Makes me think a "Windows 98" PWA on mobile would be super funny.

Unfortunately the windows sound wave file doesn't make any sound in the browser. I guess this is because a Soundcard or Speaker is not emulated.
Pessimism Is *Literally* for Losers
It was C#. I ended up writing a custom converter that converted all 3 cases into X[]
I never mentioned voting power. You vote to elect lawmakers, and lawmakers draft laws with the assistance of lobbyists + vote to appoint unelected officials responsible for enforcement. Election has no direct relevance here.

"If this was illegal, I'm sure the SEC would be on it" is based on the assumption that laws are infallible text with obvious interpretation, when the history of law enforcement - especially in finance and antitrust - is very fuzzy and about interpretation, with interpretation often down to unelected officials.
The Main Street Manifesto
This article contradicts itself by simultaneously claiming that H-1B visas _dont_ affect pay and conditions...:

"The misconception is that there is a fixed amount of work — a lump of labor. According to this view, jobs are a scarce resource to be distributed among a pool of workers who would otherwise compete for those jobs. Also, more laborers always equal less pay."

...whilst also making the case that they _do_:

"restrictions like the ones just passed will turn many skilled workers away or make it virtually impossible for companies to hire foreign workers on short or long-term bases. This will make these companies less innovative, less flexible, and ultimately less competitive."

And as a bonus, also throwing in the (often debunked) claim that there exist a category of jobs that native workers under no circumstances will do:

"In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants."

In software, the abuse of the the H-1B is pretty well documented by people who have experience of it. It is typically a mechanism to import programmers into consultancy mills who then carry out relatively low-tech work well away the FAANGs. It is racist, and absolutely calculated to undercut the cost of existing local labor (https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/hefnfm/m...)

The thing is you can reasonably make an argument that all of this is OK. That we should as a society work to keep a lid on the pay and conditions of workers in order to maximize the economic output of business. However, that is not what the linked article is doing- it is talking up the benefits of H-1b to business (fair enough), whilst attempting to brush the very real disadvantages of the scheme to all involved, native and immigrant, under the carpet.
I once wrote a long comment on Hacker News about how I wasted 2 years on trying to learn emacs. I wish I could go back and stop anyone from ever reading it in case I put someone off from trying it.

I was in a weird place at the time and scapegoated emacs for my lack of productivity. Don't get me wrong it is possible to spend a lot of time fiddling with your config files for emacs.

I picked emacs up again after I quit my last job (quitting made me almost immediately a happier person). I decided to only use packages that would help me to write code, and EVIL mode. So lsp-mode (and the associated lsp-servers), flycheck for syntax highlighting, DAP for debugging & breakpointing code, magit for git and Projectile for project management.

I read the documentation thoroughly for each plugin to actually see what it was doing, and many times jumped directly into the source code of the plugin to see how it was moving under the hood. I started using org-mode to document my journey into each plugin and grew really fond of the ability to collapse points under headers and freely move the headers about in the file with a few keystrokes.

I loved that I could create my own IDE using emacs-lisp. I have a completely minimal interface with just the mode-line and the pane of text. No gaudy menus, no enormous always present side panel, no top bar. Just me and the text. When I start the program it loads an empty window. There are no distractions in emacs, and no incentive to ever add them. And if Stallman ever decided to sell out, I have a fork of the code at its current version which I could use forever.

I jump between backend and front end code in emacs and due to the hooks and mode setup, it always knows the right things to turn on to make it easier to work on that specific chunk of text.

Emacs is an alien technology. It has so much power I didn't know what to do with it at the start and that scared me. I dedicated a bit of my life to it, and now I am confident knowing that if I pick up a new language in the future I will be writing it in emacs.
It's interesting that the he says in the guide that it's definitely worth getting a 4x4 MIMO AP/router:

> It is easy to overlook and miss, but beamforming and diversity are the key reasons why you want a 4×4 MIMO router even though most clients are still only 2×2 MIMO. The extra antennas are actually used and offer value (a stronger signal, which translate to better connect speeds for some users)!

Having been a keen user of the TP-Link Omada series of APs I went to check what their capability was. No wonder they don't mention anywhere on the site - it's only 2x2 (for the EAP225). I was able to confirm this by using their maximum speed and the access speeds table in the article.

I don't know how much I'm actually missing out on, but I'm going to stop automatically recommending these products now.
Hmm, why is it so important to "finish" a side project? Can it not be something that you work on whenever you have time, for many years? As long as there are users, software projects are rarely "finished" completely.

I just released the first public version of my first real side project [1] and I don't expect it to be "finished" for years. I have so many ideas for the domain and I am sure new users will bring continued input. Are there popular examples for successful side projects like this?

[1] https://keycombiner.com - a web application to learn and train keyboard shortcuts
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And also quite useful in a wide range of numerical methods for PDEs like discontinuous Galerkin (and spectral methods in general).
It's fair to say it's a non-capitalist power, I think. It's the government interfering in the operation of companies instead of allowing it to be entirely controlled by the market players - for good reason, of course.

A capitalist alternative would probably look more like levying fees or capping prices to try and balance the market... which is something that also happens from time to time.
Project Loon is quite interesting.

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

Fiber would have been great had they succeeded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
Maybe some companies are interested in this as well. As I know from work, the PLC manufacturer Pilz [1] e.g. uses 68k type CPUs in some of the products.

[1] https://www.pilz.com/
Hypothetical question: If you where a program running in the VM how would you know if you are in one?
That's interesting! I wonder if that was indeed what I was running into.
Centralized internet properties are probably good for foreign intelligence, but then the risk of that to people is also far less.
Ask HN: Best books to transition from development to product management?
The comment is about Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophic movement where many of the permaculture (but also a lot of lets say more questionable) ideas have been popular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture
Investment in learning something like vi makes sense in the nix world, where it is available everywhere by default. On Windows side the problem is that there's no comprehensive "default editor" to learn.

If you are doing server side sysadmin work on different environments then you might be limited to what is already available. Often you don't want to go through the trouble of getting a specific editor installed in order to edit some config files (3rd party software may require approval, somebody to install it, etc).
Bulk mail is on the order of half the retail price of postage. So it is still a big part of their revenue. And you can get the commercial discount rate by printing your own postage at home for one off packages. If you are mailing 100+ things a month, presorting them etc, you can pay bulk rates too
Yep, that's one of the things I had in mind when mumbling about 'better IPC'. Safari already only supports that type of model. I think the day is not far when automated scans/app stores/etc start flagging the local http server thing as high risk/potential malware vector. It's an architectural dead-end.

On the other hand, some of the other stuff may not be fully baked:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173724
I find it ridiculous because it's not a comparison between the USPS and a similar service in China. Both companies are getting the same service in America, but the foreign companies get it much more cheaply. To the point that shipping something from China to the US, then from the US to me is cheaper than an American company shipping something directly to me. I'm guilty of buying plenty of $1-$2 dollar knicknacks with free epacket shipping on AliExpress. An American company can't even compete, because shipping alone is going to cost them more than the $1-$2 I paid for the Chinese item
Russia is an exporter themselves, suffering greatly right now due to the low oil price. They are no less dependent on oil for their economy, and some say regime change is closer now than it has been in a long time.

Xi is different, but its a big question whether the Saudis would agree to their usually awful terms.
Theme Park Adopts AI-Powered Density Solution to Ensure Safe Experiences
You could confiscate the domain so that both products have to compete from scratch, or go with a domain-splitting solution sort of like how the european regulators' "Browser choice" resulted in a randomized list of browser options at first Windows boot.

Not sure I'd argue either of those would work, but there are options.
>They're also quite happy to discriminate based on the genetic relationship: My parents let my brother and me live in their house, rent-free, and we were even fed!

But your parents didn't petition the government to prevent kids from the neighbouring town from entering your town.
Is that you Elon? ;-)
You can't have Empire without Return of the Jedi.
Unless you are actually running out of space, why is that even a criteria? Unless two programs are exactly feature-paired, why would you even think about how much storage they take up? The only explanation is that your work has made you think about space taken by programs for legitimate reasons and you are unable to think outside that mindset - when the cheapest phones ship with 50-100x more space than that, when a single minute of video from a regular persons phone could take up this much space, when the regular user consumes 10x that bandwidth every day in the internet? Who cares if it's 100 MB?
I think you underestimate how many fans of strong anti-trust enforcement would actually be in favor of breaking up almost every one of those mega-companies that's been vacuuming up competitors through acquisitions for decades.

All the examples you mentioned probably have a negative impact on the market (and the public), the ones I'm familiar with definitely do.
Thank you for posting this - one of the most simultenously amusing/depressing things I have ever seen!
That seems to miss the point. Ordered containers maintain order. What you're describing is needing ordered results at the end "...and sorting when I'm done". And if you need ordered results only at some end point, it's probably more efficient to accumulate them unsorted then sort them just when needed.

What do you regularly do that needs a data structure that maintains order consistently? A LUT for compiler symbols could be implemented as a binary (or n-ary) tree but that order is incidental; it's only used to get fast lookup. A hash would be faster. I think graph algos may be different but I've never used one, and they tend to use heaps to get an order, but don't need to maintain an ordered collection.
Currently in Germany it maybe works the other way around.

Last month around me it worked like this:
Big spikes in case were caused by a test-campaign around somebody who died (or was ill). So a trend in case might in fact be an old trend of death - and the burst in case might in fact be asymptomatic or mild cases not leading to any death.

When you try to fit the spikes of death and case things are strange. In Germany maybe case and death have completely detached from each other.

Currently there are a lot of corrections going on. Bavaria had a deathcount of -3 on Saturday. Maybe they are piling up to report a big spike soon, or they stopped someone from reporting nonsense? We will see...
Great resource! I’ve been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP’s out there?
> All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors

And Google has acquired hundreds of companies in the last 20 years.
US Anti trust laws applies to monopolies [1] where one of the penalties for abusing a monopoly is breaking up the company which was famously done to Standard Oil and AT&T. The EU have found Google guilty of antitrust violations and fined them a record €1.5 billion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...
The fractional cost of a single phone cover on a container ship crossing the pacific is... extremely low.

Large container ships hold 14,000 TEU (twenty-foot-equiv) containers, each of which has a volume of 33m^3.

Let's use an iPhone's size as a stand-in for the phone cover: it's 173 x 70 x 8mm.

Divide the first by the latter: (14000 * 33m^3) / (143mm * 71mm 8mm), and, as google will helpfully tell us (https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&sxsrf=ALe...) you can ship 5.6x10^9, or 5.6 billion of these on a single ship.

From some related information it seems shipping rates for a single container are around $1,000 for China->US. Plug that in and the costs are ... $0.002, or 1/5th of a cent: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&sxsrf=ALe...

I may be off by an order of magnitude somewhere. But it just feels intuitively obvious that most of the costs of any delivery are incurred during the 15 seconds or so the mailman spends in your driveway or trying to find the mailbox with your name.
You're correct that dominating a single market is bad, but using your dominance of a single market to bankroll taking over other markets is pretty nasty and you can't trivially do something like that if you aren't already fabulously wealthy from dominating a market.

In the case of the article, it's specifically talking about how Google is doing that.
If there ever was a people divorced from its nationstate, its Russia. I know the propaganda department does not allow for critical thinking on this matter, but Russians did not win, and have never really won.

That I hope will change someday.
Shipping Greatness

https://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Greatness-Practical-launchin...
I didn't mention hand-written letters at all so I've no idea why you're asking that question.

Your original message seemed to express concern that the original purpose of the rules for international shipping was to support people in poorer countries?

If this cross-subsidisation is removed, then people in poorer countries will pay more and people in richer countries will pay less to send stuff to each other. That's simple arithmetic.

And I was wondering how someone could simultaneously support such a policy while expressing concern about access to international post in poorer countries.
I wrote something similar 9 months ago (just relying on VLC functionalities + youtube-dl + avahi) and I have been using it since then (but less elegant): https://gist.github.com/frafra/9f5770c6af6e4dcdf91ba815225e5...

The main problem I have is that it is not possible to easily resume the stream when youtube-dl stops working and you use a pipe or mkfifo. It would be cool to be able to rerun the program again and continue from where it left, but some streams are not seekable, so you would need to restart the software automatically, consume or skip the first part and start adding the new content at the end of the FIFO device.
> It is completely another story when you have people with authoritarian intentions coming in though.

The Nazi party went from ~2-3% of the vote to 37% of the vote in 4 years [0]. 5 years from 2-3% to the last election they had to contend with.

If the strategy is to wait for people with authoritarian intentions to come though before getting worried about privacy it will be far to late; things can go south extremely quickly. It is advised to stop the databases being developed before it becomes obvious that someone is abusing them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Ascension_and_conso...
Can API Governance Help with Third-Party APIs?
Are you sure you've never paid a cent? Many products or services you buy are probably funneling some money into Google's pockets - perhaps licensing fees or agreements with Google, company profits being handed to Google for advertising. If you've ever bought an Android app or In-App Purchase, 30% of that went directly to Google.

If you think you're getting Google products and services for free, you're just not paying attention.
This comment really speaks to me as someone who just got a software project into a minimum-viable state after two years of this exact kind of off-and-on burst programming. I threw away several prototype approaches in that time and am left with something that should serve my needs for a long time without significant maintenance investment. It's nowhere near the most complicated thing I've ever written but is easily the thing I'm proudest of. I used to feel a lot more like the OP author, have only recently experienced what you describe, and really hope I can channel and maintain this as a way to avoid burnout and demotivation.
AWS is so profitable it turned Amazon from a marginal business into a tech giant. As for Google and Microsoft they don't get out of bed in the morning for anything less than a billion dollar opportunity.

A large part of the cost of a VM on these clouds is paying their super high employee comp, for advanced software development e.g. CosmosDB/DynamoDB, but most of all, contributing to the high revenue growth that drives stock prices.

It's not paying for the actual cost of hardware. Smart people know this and don't run in the cloud unless they get a sweetheart deal. Consider that GitHub, for example, runs/ran in their own datacenter and used the cloud only for spillover capacity. Zoom also (although now Oracle cut them a sweetheart deal). Netflix built their own CDN etc.
cool!
[bookmarked]