skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. The US has always been a little 'special' in the club ob western nations, in many respects. That was always cause for a certain level of mistrust, which is actually healthy. But in the broad, I would say the general perception amoung the other western nations was still overall positive. Now some (by far not all) aspects on the 'plus' side have been put in question, while on the 'minus' side, not a lot improved. But I don't see it so black and white. Another leader or even Trump himself could turn it around, if they were interested.

The breakdown of the (hidden) alliance the US media had with American politics to now open hostility could make that harder, because it is visible worldwide. Again, the media could turn it around, if it wanted to. But it feels unlikely, they will with Trump. So the best chance for reconciliation between the fourth power and the government is a democratic win in the upcoming election.

Fair or not fair, it seems from an outside perspective that if Trump wins again, all hell could break lose in the US. There could be a civil war anarchy vs. authority.

I think there are some things amoung Trumps policies, that if people were a little more honest have been attractive even to the left of some or even most of the other western nations, like putting more value on local labor.

The problem is less about opinions and more a concern that a 'lapse' on US part to care for democracy and freedom worldwide (even if it might not always have been genuine in the past either), openly speaking more positive about some more authoritarian leaders than democratic leaders, etc. could have the more long lasting negative effect on the world.
The most popular kind of quant trading is using a factor model. The first step is developing some alpha factor, a number that is predictive of how much money you'll make from each stock. So let's say my alpha factor is "companies with good earnings per share will go up." So I first take the EPS for all the stocks in my universe and maybe rank, then zscore. Now I have some positive numbers and some negative numbers. These represent the weights of my portfolio. The positive weighted companies I go long, the negative ones I go short. The bigger the number, the larger my allocations.

Now that I have my alpha factor I backtest it and whatever. Since the mean of a zscore is zero, I know I'm market neutral, so (ignoring some stuff) my factor should have little exposure to the market.

If I think it's good, I add it to my other alpha factors and combine them somehow. Could be as simple as adding them all up, or maybe something like using random forests to figure out the best way to combine them, or whatever. Now that I have a bunch of alpha factors all combined, I can run them through the optimization engine.

The optimization engine will adjust the weights of my "ideal" portfolio in order to reduce exposure to various risk factors (thus lowering volatility). My optimizer will also figure out how often I need to rebalance. There's generally a bunch of terms in there that try to reduce trading costs and zero out exposure while not diluting the "ideal" portfolio too much (or else the alpha could be wiped out).

Now, after all of this, I'm ready to trade.

In short, what we're trying to do is reduce our exposure to as many factors as possible and just get exposure to our alpha factor. We don't want the market, price of oil, sex scandal of a CEO, or anything else affecting our portfolio. We are trying to dig up this latent, unearthed, alpha that exists in the market, but doesn't belong to one company or asset.
> Many people haven't moved outside of "enterprise" programming languages, so they don't even realize how bad stuff like PHP is at converting business logic into code. Try doing a real project in Kotlin if you like static types. Try Clojure or Elixir if you like dynamic types.

Outside of your average copy/paste stack overflow Wordpress dev, most PHP programmers are very aware of it's flaws, and would probably welcome the chance to move on.

However, the frustrating thing about the prevailing attitude is that creates a stereotype that all PHP developers are incompetent, and this stops PHP devs moving on. I've been trying for the better part of a decade to move out of PHP as my main language. I have github projects in various other languages, submitted patches to open source projects, but the above attitude means that outside of existing PHP shops, no one is interested in hiring me.

I've literally had one potential job tell me that they liked my python code assignment, but they had a policy of not hiring PHP programmers. It was not an isolated incident.

Given those attitudes, are you surprised PHP devs bitterly defend the language?
The Time the U.S. Government Banned Sliced Bread
Because the things we need don't sell for 1 billion?
The MWI is a cop-out. The problem of nonlocality just gets handed off to whatever process forks the parallel universes - it has to ensure that every universe has consistent outcomes for both halves of a Bell experiment, for instance.

The probabilities in QM should be viewed as subjective, but physicists hate subjectivity, so they talk about hypothetical ensembles. It baffles me that Everett took those ensembles and decided they were real universes.
"Privilege" is a word used by emotionally weak people. Mind your own life and stop judging others.
I never considered until now combining UBI with regressive taxation to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich...

Thank you for the thought experiment.
Someone still has to create all of that content for others to consume.

In any case, how do you know that most people only want their computers to be consumption devices? If there is no serious attempt to offer more or show most people what could be possible, you can't tell whether the current trend is genuinely what people would want or simply due to them not knowing any better.
I also think it might help to stop showing posts in the main feed just because friends liked or commented on them. I see a lot of inflammatory posts that aren't even originally from anybody on my friends or likes list, just because one of my friends commented.
Looks good. But I find it hard to read in that form. Cool project. It works on nsfw subreddits too.
Congress is infamously bad at overseeing anything. For that reason, from time to time journalists have helped the public to make direct policy recommendations. Of course the bureaucratic state prefers not to accommodate that form of oversight.
Huh? The one thing you generally can't update is the kernel since it's the foundation of every other process. I haven't used ubuntu in several years, have things changed drastically?
Muse+Sleep+Mattress+Savings+$250+Plus+FREE+Pillow
I was thinking the exact same thing. I am giving my phone, that has photos of my home, family, loved ones, addressees, etc. etc. to someone who has a criminal past. It is like giving your kid's photo to a pedophile. I prefer if offenders handle my food instead of shitloads of private and sensitive data.
You don't see Warren Buffet buying indices either..

If you aren't willing to put in the work, sure just hold an all weather portfolio or whatever. But I don't think it's super hard to beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis, especially as a retail investor. Most of all, it takes a passion for it (trading is a hobby) and also a reasonable amount of time dedication.

For example, there are a number of persistent factors that don't go away. Things like value, low-beta, size factors, etc. It's not super hard to leverage the tons and tons of papers that have been published to construct a portfolio that does really well. And, due to structural reasons, will do well until the laws change (almost all persistent factors exist due to some law).

Especially in the current market environment, it's really easy to make a killing. The market is moving purely on sentiment and day traders have had some really great opportunities to make stacks in the past couple of months.
The problem is that these principles work great in a homogeneous society where everyone has some kind of stake in the societal outcome. If you take people with a particular skin color and enslave them and otherwise systematically discriminate against them to varying degrees over the course of 400 years then these principles break down. It is going to take a long, long time -- probably multiple generations -- for American society to recover from 400 years of institutionalized racism.
47341 new cases yesterday. Skyrocketing fast. But you know, gotta reopen everything to keep the stock market happy.
What's the use case you're after ?
No successful strategy ever has been based on price. Price isn't stationary so you can't do anything with it. You need to be looking at the log returns. Price is completely irrelevant, at least for equities.
I find most of this article to be “successful people can’t explain why they are successful so they say a bunch of arbitrary things they’ve noticed”.

He found success pursuing relative advantages, infrastructure advantages, and building custom tools from scratch.

But absolute vs relative advantages, plumbing together canned solutions vs building your own from scratch, infrastructure-level advantages vs decision making advantages...all of those contrasts exist in other businesses everywhere. None of those are specific to trading.

> “in my experience, nothing beats learning by doing or finding a mentor”

This hits the nail on the head.

The best way to become a profitable trader is with a mentor, but it’s nearly entirely luck. You drive an Uber or tend bar and happen to make friends with someone successful who is willing to guide you. Trying to seek out a mentor online is nearly impossible, as everyone who is findable and willing is almost certainly a better marketer than trader.

The other way to become a profitable trader is to start trading with real money. It’s amazing how quickly one can learn how to mend a boat, when the boat starts sinking.
Maybe not naive... The internet hasn't created any new behavior, at most it has amplified a few existing human tendencies.

Not all of them bad ones. I suspect once we've finished adjusting to the new digital reality it will have, on balance, made us smarter.

If giving more people access to more information and a place in the cultural conversation doesn't improve things then the human race was doomed anyway.
I’ve thought about something. I’m pretty sure that being single can really do some damages to you, or having a poor family more easily leads to you becoming a criminal. I’ve once heard someone saying that if everybody could get hooked then there would be no terrorism. Does it mean we should invest in surveillance and monitoring of people who are poor and single? Or should we instead fund aids, universal healthcare, free education or even UBI.
Which distros have that problem? I generally stick to arch or centos, neither of which has tried to kneecap me at login time. Of course, both are fairly manual for updates unless you set up cron jobs to schedule them for you.
What was the turning point? Why vote if the system is an oligarchy?
I use Firefox Nightly and have for the last few months. It's very good.
What I think society needs is an rspec of government spending (I'm using rspec as it is clear, or should be, what that implies). Test driven government, in essence.

Society is varied across county, city, state and country lines, and we are in our infancy in understanding what policies work, when, where and why. Combine that with no overt expected outcome, i.e. do we expect this policy to have an absolute outcome (assert(absolute_wealth > X)) or if we want a comparative outcome (assert(relative_income > 0.77)), and we end up with arguments about spending that are judged by rhetoric rather than success or failure on what should be a knowable scale.

Being more overt in how society judges government spending, especially when the goal is a social good, gives us the best shot at spending more on effective interventions, and less on ineffective ones. I think it also helps mitigate the circus nature of politics, where politicians gain kudos simply for with their spending decisions, and are rarely held accountable to actual outcomes. Like TDD, it would by no means be a panacea, but it would be a step in the right direction.

While it true that a policy can be fantastic for society, but exacerbate inequalities (i.e. get better at extracted value from smart people), or be terrible for society but reduce inequality (just make sure everyone has nothing and job done), if we at least tested the policy along some overt lines, and threw out the very worst policies, I can't imagine social spending would have worse outcomes, if only until the loopholes are worked out.
Thunder is the sound that lightning makes, no? Unless I’m misunderstanding, the two things you’ve described are one and the same.

That being said, if you’re close—really close—the sound does change. Lightning used to regularly strike a pair of trees just outside my bedroom window when I was growing up, since it was the top of a hill, and the trees were the tallest thing around, by far. Were my window open, I could reach out and touch the taller of the two trees.

The sound is so loud and so abrupt that I’m not really sure how to describe it. It’s instantaneous—over before you realize that there was a sound. It’s not a steady, drawn-out rumble like you might expect. In addition to the overwhelming, deafening crack, sometimes I would hear what sounded like a scream or a whistle—but that was almost certainly just a sensory artifact and not a real noise. Other people in the house would describe different artifacts.

I probably make it sound scary, but I always looked forward to thunderstorms as a kid, and each time I’d hope the storm would get close enough to strike those trees. It was absolutely amazing to watch—and, being a child with no sense of danger, I’d sit right by the window.
Well, I'm just saying it's not an issue that businesses care about.

Removing a few extra lines of unused code in a product will have basically no visible effect to the end user. And might have no measurable effect on the burden of maintenance either.

Maybe if you could find a way to measure the complexity that you're reducing, in some kind of metric, then businesses will care.
It's in air, it's in water, it's in food... ultimately, it's also in us.
Added the year now. Thanks!

Older posts are fine.
China is building its own Silicon Valley
And conveniently forgetting that I set my default browser to anything other than whatever-microsoft-vomited-up-most-recently.
So are the chemicals we place on fields of food. Everything we're doing is toxic. We think the earth can support 7 or 8 billion people but in the current ways of doing things, it can probably only do so for another 100 years maximum.
The difference between Uber and ISP is that in addition to penalizing for illegal activity they will surely rip all the infrastructure built.

I would imagine that if you would run fiber to the nearest POP they probably wouldn't mind connecting you, since anything wrong with it would be on you.
Trubka, a Swiss Army CLI Knife for Apache Kafka, Built in Go
Bunnie Huang’s Hacking The Xbox is a great read, and it’s available as a free ebook:

https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf
Suppose 100 processes on the same box call the same function in glibc. If each process had its own redundant version of it mapped into memory, then that's 100x more cache misses compared to them all sharing the same page.

I get that only a handful of libraries are actually used, but that's a very fat tail and the performance will be very bad if that handful of libraries are always statically linked. This may be less important if the program is in a container (isn't sharing anyway) or launched as an AWS Lambda throwaway. I dunno, maybe dynamic linking isn't relevant anymore now that most Linux programs are meant to run in containers on an expensive cloud with tons of memory.

> In practice I much prefer the microservice model with a formal IPC API.

This converts a simple and solved problem, sharing memory, to a client-server distributed systems problem. There is no need. It's all on the same box.
A New Mystery in Patoshi Timestamps
I have read a lot of your writing, much more than you've linked here, simply by being active on this site for just over three years. While I don't really think I could say I know you personally, I think I have at least a little bit of context about you, what your interests are, and what you like to talk about. Your comments have been consistently useful and relevant, and I have no complaints there.

But back to the topic: form and content are not a zero-sum game. You can be eloquent and polite while also conveying useful information, as you mention yourself. You can find people who do this, and it's not a big deal if you're trying to do it yourself. Honestly. If you think about it, the reason I'm replying to you (and why I stick around in some threads and leave others) is both the content and the way it's dicussed: I usually stop interacting when people start hurling insults, because it's just exhausting to deal with it for extended periods of time. It's part of the reason why I occasionally leave Reddit frustrated, why I'm not on Twitter, and why I let other people pull information out of Slashdot and 4chan for me. Really, if I can find one person who says something useful but surrounds it with vicious barbs, and another who can say the same thing but without the acid, why wouldn't I want to go with them? If I can only find the latter, perhaps I'm with the wrong people.

And again, I do personally make some concessions for people I truly do think have exceptional content–but again, these are some concessions. Even Linus–who is usually the poster child of the "who cares how you say it?", who is exceedingly bright and talented, and who is basically a "equal opportunity abuser"–could probably tone it down some. When he is right it's just extra verbiage I need to scroll through and ignore, and when he's wrong (and he is for some things) it just makes him sound extra rude.
Because you could buy a Windows PC at the Microsoft store and not have to spend hours removing all of the third party crapware from the OEM and even more crapware
from Best Buy.

Either that, or you have to go directly to the vendors website and buy one of the business laptops.
OpenMW Spotlight: Turning the Pages
Were you in a city with decent 5g coverage? More recently, I’ve been impressed with the smooth streaming of master quality audio.
The 's' used be a very long 's', similar to a written 'f' and so was often printed as an 'f'.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S_long_serif_et_sans...

This is similar to the German 'ss' or 'sz' (one long 's' followed by a short 's') which when printed or written in the Gothic font looks like a Greek 'beta'.

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/68183/how-...
Here is brief Pew Research article that backs up the statement: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/08/how-people-...

I think it's fair to say that Obama was much more trusted in Europe than either Bush or Trump. When you break it down by country the story is more complex, but the poster did admit to being western European.
It's not so bad.
What do you propose instead?
Price based arbitrage was very successful for Edward Thorpe http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all-markets/
> It’s your non-mandatory voting.

Erm, no. What actually kills voter turnout is lack of polling venues. If voting were a quick, painless process on a national holiday, we would see much higher turnouts.

As it is, the current situation is so bad one can't help but think it was purposefully engineered to be that way. Voting should not have to take hours due to lack of venues.

Hopefully mail-in ballots will become the norm, allowing people to vote easily without having to go to a venue.
The problem is that it's bad for standards. We're currently in a situation where standards are basically completely irrelevant, and the only thing anyone cares about is support in Blink. This is basically where we were with IE6 a few years ago.
If it ever sees the light of day. How many years has it been?
The title comes from interviewing one of the authors of the paper. It's a term one of the authors of the paper used to explain this. Presumably the way they communicate with journalists (and the broader public) is different than how they communicate with other experts in their field through their paper. There are lots of things to criticize the media for, but this doesn't seem like one of them.
The XBox might be “interesting” but it isn’t a high volume, high margin item. It’s sold at a lost and has sold less than 50 million in its entire lifetime. Apple sells that many iPhones in a bad quarter, it sells about that many iPads in a year.

https://www.vgchartz.com/
The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://api.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/hot?limit=25. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).

The resource at “https://api.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/hot?limit=25” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

ReferenceError: error is not defined

MacOS, Firefox 77.0.1
Yeah it’s just a rocket lawyer blog post, trying to sell their services, but I actually found it it very informative. The list of documents whose demand has gone up during the pandemic is interesting to browse. It’s not an area I tend to think about.

Also, clicking around the list lead me to a lot of good FAQs. I’ve never looked at it before, but their website actually looks pretty nice.
Lightning seems particularly tough on high frequency signal processing hardware. A lightning strike on an invisible dog fence the previous owners had left in place around our house fried, along with a couple of ethernet ports, every HDMI connector that was plugged in in one particular room at the time. Rest of the devices continued to function perfectly, but those HDMI input/outputs were cooked. Similar HDMI devices in another room were totally unaffected. My working theory is that the devices in the affected room were plugged in to multiple power sockets, giving a longer antenna loop through the sensitive components, while in the unaffected room all the devices were running off the same power strip. Would explain why ethernet - connecting devices in different rooms - also seems vulnerable.

Not much more evidence to go on, so it's largely superstition, but as a result I do generally try to keep my whole AV setup - game console, TV, AV receiver, etc. - plugged into a single power strip now.

I also now have a cat who is exceptionally nervous whenever he hears thunder. My wife and son were home at the time and... yes, the sound of a lightning strike at point blank is not just loud, it's.. like a crack in the world.
Thanks for the response, that's an interesting way to deal with it. How do you verify a dependency? Do you literally examine the source code? Make sure the build is reproduced? or just the meta data? (downloads, stars) has the portfolio actually prevented any vulnerabilities?

It's pretty common for JS projects to have thousands of transitive dependencies, I'm not sure keeping a private portfolio is much use. The entire open-source ecosystem is built on the foundation of trust, if I use a package that's being used by 500 other packages, I can have a high degree of certainty that the package is safe, and by locking the dependencies with yarn.lock I can prevent sneaky updates from entering the system.

Anyway maybe I'll look into the dependency portfolio, see how it goes.
Thanks, this is exactly the sort of feedback I'm after.
Coherent Unix Goes Open-Source (2015)
Is this still true?

> We want to make something crystal clear: no one can pay to be added to one of Spotify’s editorial playlists. Our editors pick tracks with listeners in mind. They make these decisions using data about what’s resonating most with their community of listeners.

https://artists.spotify.com/blog/share-new-music-for-playlis...
Nice work! This is awesome.