skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the feeling it was a pretty international effort.
Banks can't take pre-rolled coins. They have to break them and recount.
> code reviews aren't a rubber stamp

I still remember my first "real" job.
The team was on TFS and my code was basically

if (condition)
{
if (same condition)
{
// do something
}
}

and a senior developer laughed and said mcny is testing whether we actually look at the code and not just rubber stamp his changes.

It was actually an honest mistake.

At the same place though, we had F5 load balancers and actual integration with AS/400 systems but development/test environments didn't have a load balancer in front of them :(
Schools Beat Earlier Plagues With Outdoor Classes
The Fastest Navigation Layout for a Three-Level Menu
It was a bug in their Windows driver right after the game was released on Windows, when every other non-AMD and some AMD users (depending on your card) were playing it just fine.
>but include info on all the various ways we do have to get in touch with us.
This is seldom fair. Far too few organizations provide any asynchronous means of contacting them. I instead have to call them and get placed in a hold queue. Complete garbage. I don't want to have a synchronous conversation all of the time.
> A very basic Markov model can come up with content that seem surprisingly like a human would say.

This is false. Natural language involves long-term dependencies that are beyond the ability of any Markov model to handle. GPT-2 and -3 can reproduce those dependencies reliably.

> If anything, what all of the OpenAI hype should confirm is just how predictable and regular human language is.

Linguists have been trying to write down formal grammars for natural languages since the 1950s. Some of the brightest people around have essentially devoted their lives to this task. And yet no one has ever produced a complete grammar of any human language. So no, human language is not predictable and regular, at least not in any way that we know how to describe formally.
Some of the pros as listed in the article taken point by point:

> It also encourages the developer to keep pull requests small, ensuring a feature is developed in many small pull requests (or at the very least comprising of many atomic commits).

I am of the opinion that pre-commit reviews also encourage small pull requests, if only to make it easier on reviewers -> easy review hopefully leads to fast approvals.

> It also allows the reviewer to batch reviews, so they are reviewing a number of changes in one fell swoop, as opposed to being constantly interrupted for code reviews.

This I can see being a potential benefit depending on the workflow. You could technically do the same pre-commit by working on a longer branch and putting that up for review as well.

> In my own experience, this reduces nitpicking on the reviewer’s part, and in the event the reviewer does nitpick, it allows the developer to address the minor concerns at their leisure.

Nitpicks are what they are, and shouldn't block a PR in the first place, so not sure how much benefit this would be.

> If a design document has been clearly fleshed out and agreed upon before the code is implemented, the implementation will not comprise of any major surprises to the reviewer.

That depends - the design may have been agreed upon by someone, but not necessarily by the reviewer. There may still be major surprises, which will be harder to fix post merge than pre merge.

> This means that the reviewer can have a fair degree of confidence that the change is functionally correct and has undergone extensive testing before they review it.

This seems brittle when there are lots of changes going on at once. It may be hard to narrow down if something works or not.

> Building trust and learning how to work well as a team takes time.

I think this line makes it clear to me where my difference in opinion is. I don't even necessarily trust my own code!
Ultimately the greatest factor is stereotypes about inventors. The OpenAI team doesn’t remind anyone of say the Manhattan Project team in any way. They don’t look act or sound like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Elon Musk does, and that’s why I think people get so excited about rockets that land themselves. That is honestly pretty cool. Very few people pull stuff like that off. But is it less cool than GPT3?

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were also online payments entrepreneurs like Elon Musk so it’s not like it was about their background / prior history. It’s also not about sounding too grandiose or delusional, Musk says way crazier stuff in his Twitter than Greg Brockman has ever said in his life. It’s clearly not about tempering expectations. Musk promises self driving cars every year!

So I think there are a lot of factors that impact the public consciousness about how cool or groundbreaking a discovery is. Personally I think the core problem is the contrivance of it all, that the OpenAI people think so much about what they say and do and Elon does not at all, and that kind of measured, Machiavellian strategizing is incommensurable with public demand for celebrity.

What about objective science? There was this striking Google Research paper on quantum computing that put the guy who made “some pipes” first author. I sort of understand abstractly why that’s so important but it’s hard for me to express to you precisely how big of a discovery that is. Craig Gentry comes to mind also as someone who really invented some new math and got some top accolades from the academy for it. There is some stereotyping at play here that may favor the OpenAI team after all - they certainly LOOK more like Craig Gentry or pipes guy than Elon Musk does. That’s a good thing so I guess in the pursuit of actually advancing human knowledge it doesn’t really matter what a bunch of sesame grinders on Hacker News, Twitter and Wired think.
Sorry, I should have worded that message better. It was an AMD Windows driver bug with absolutely terrible response from them.
With the rise of the Green Movement the sentence has actually taken on a semblance of meaning.
As you point out, the JVM is getting preemption by means of Loom. .NET already has coroutines (async/await) so it should already do what you stated.
https://joinmastodon.org/ ?
Product design tradeoffs: Stretch pickup truck
I think that's a bad example, has anyone gotten elected over the corona hoax thing?

Besides, "I would rather accept the risk of virus X than the inconvenience of wearing a mask," is a perfectly legitimate position for many viruses, and deciding which ones it applies to is the exact same kind of utility balance and value debate as any other policy choice.
The feeling of reading through well-written long-form articles is very satisfying. Do any HN’ers have recommendations for websites with well-written long-form articles?
First of this launch window (2020) for the expedition to Mars.
The best is the enemy of the good [1]. I constantly remind myself of that and I still fall for the trap. So I write down two questions, dubbed the procrastination questions:

1. What do you think you are supposed to do now?
2. What kind of difficulty are you facing?

And then it's easier to continue working.

[1]: often attributed to Voltaire
> If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances.

Yes, Chomsky mentions this in a footnote. But as far as I know, it hasn't been tried with modern language models.

There's been some interesting work that tries to reproduce grammaticality judgments in terms of language model probability after controlling for length and lexical content. It turns out it works pretty well. For instance https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf
Yes, because all of Europe isn't doing any research on drugs...

And Japan and the UK and China and so on...

That's an extremely US centric view. The market in the US is inelastic and inefficient. There's a reason why the prices are so high relative to care provided in other western countries.
The novelty of GPT3 is its few shot learning capabilities. GPT3 shows a new, previously-unknown, and, most importantly, extremely useful property of very large transformers trained on text -- that they can learn to do new things quickly. There isn't any ML researcher on record who predicted it.
> the entire elixir community has basically left SO and gone to elixir-specific fora

That's very surprising to me. Do SO's metrics of questions/answers/etc reflect this? If so, why the move? Was it organic? Organized?
it has 70k live viewers. it seems it is scam.

The channel has 3 videos, the channel name is Live News but it has a cnbc logo.
And the video is old.
In many respects, Syphon is a good name. Short (two syllables!), memorable, reasonably easy to write and set to become easy to search for.

And yet you've failed.

It's not just that siphoning something off has shady connotations already in general usage[1], but that in tech reporting specifically, it's referring to the mass exfiltration of data:

"How Facebook Was Able to Siphon Off Phone Call and Text Logs"[2]

"StrandHogg 2.0 can also hijack other app permissions to siphon off sensitive user data, like contacts, photos, and track a victim’s real-time location."[3]

"Perhaps the most sinister of them all is an attack designed to siphon off your organisation’s data, otherwise known as data exfiltration."[4]

"Data exfiltration is how hackers siphon out valuable intelligence from a business."[5]

"Report: Chinese Hackers Siphon Off ‘Massive’ Amounts of Undersea Military Data"[6]

To name a messaging app like that might almost seem like overt cynicism to casual observers.

I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. What is it that I have missed?

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/sipho...

[2] https://newstalk1290.com/how-facebook-was-able-to-siphon-off...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/strandhogg-malicious-apps-...

[4] https://www.csa.gov.sg/gosafeonline/go-safe-for-business/sme...

[5] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/10/02/dns-exfiltration/

[6] https://threatpost.com/report-chinese-hackers-siphon-off-mas...

PS: Nice graphics on your website, very pleasant to look at and built with diversity in mind–but what the heck is the dude looking at the black circle supposed to signify? I'd get rid of that one. To be very frank, it appears to be something vulgar to me. O;)
That one is 0 sentences long because of paywall.
The article is using composition for inheritance as an implementation detail. The effect is the same as "full" inheritance in that the "subclass" is fully inheriting the aspects of the "superclass" unless you introduce a vtable to allow overriding effects.

In terms of why to avoid inheritance, there are many reasons not tied to multiple inheritance, but the foremost one is to avoid exposing implementation details that may not make sense.

One thing to remember is that in OO public APIs "A is a B" really translates to "A's API is a superset of B's". Which is really not what we often think of as "is a" in daily speech. E.g. we might consider a Circle "is a" Ellipse to be a reasonable statement, because in day to day speech "is a" tends to denote a specialization that may be a superset and subset of different aspects of something at the same time, but if these objects are mutable, then allowing you to set all the parameters of an Ellipse for your Circle object will allow you to create a Circle object that is not actually a Circle.

So really, the point is to avoid inheritance unless you actually want to inherit and possibly expand on the full API of the class you're inheriting from. If I want a mutable Circle object, I shouldn't be inheriting from a mutable Ellipse - in fact in terms of API it may well make more sense for my Ellipse to inherit the API of a Circle.

You'll often find those kinds of inverted relationships in OO. Some types of OO can handle this - e.g. prototype based inheritance would allow you to simple remove methods that makes no sense in the subclass; alternatively you can trigger exceptions etc., but this violates what is very often a central contract of inheritance that users tends to rely on: That you can treat an object as if it is an object of its superclass in most contexts. It's better then to aim for subclassing to strictly superset the API.
I can't believe I am reading this because I feel like you just described the same exact situation I have experienced in college as well (except I still have one more year left). I switched from CS to a BUSINESS major after freshman year for similar reasons, absolutely despised the teaching environment for some of these massive pre-reqs/weed-out classes. The Java class in particular ruined it for me.

However, now once again I find myself really wanting to give it another go and feel ready to take on the advanced coursework, but tuition is expensive. Do you have any advice to a rising college senior who is about to wrap up a seemingly textbook business major but feels impassioned by coding?
I cannot speak to the specific challenges in the banking industry, but from a manufacturing perspective, you can't just add a week of inventory without a ton of headache.

For most supply chains, adding a week of inventory would mean bringing on additional warehousing space and filling everything they have to the gills. I'm familiar with a factory who has a few hours of inventory on-site, and no more than ~3 days in the accompanying warehouse. They'd need about 2 more equal size warehouses to add a week of inventory.
The readme doesn't describe why it's faster. Looking at the code of the variant that is the fastest: https://github.com/scandum/binary_search/blob/master/binary-...

It seems like it's a quaternary search which seems like an arbitrary "magic number" of interior points. It's easy to understand what it does if you already know other variants like ternary search (cut search space into 3 to pick 2 interior points) or golden section search (same thing as ternary except in golden ratio). Here, quaternary search is just picking 3 interior points after dividing into 4 parts.

So the speed up is the same as how b-trees get their speedup: increase branching factor which costs more comparisons but reduces the depth. I might be wrong, but instead of quaternary it could also be 5-ary or 8-ary or any B-ary and any of these variants can also have the potential to perform better.

Just a tradeoff between: cost_of_divide * log_B(N) + cost_of_compare * (B - 1) * log_B(N)

EDIT: Thinking about it more, the divison doesn't seem like it should be the most expensive operation (especially relative to compares/branching). Anyone have any better ideas on why you would prefer more compares? Is it some pipelining thing?
Kubectl Life Saver
A simple script generates useful kubectl aliases, and a simple interactive kubectl command builder using peco.
I Improved My Wordpress Blog to Load SuperFast
>as long as the assets are denominated in money (your 401k balance is in dollars)

This seems to me like saying that if the size of an inch shrinks, things measured in inches will too. I mean, for the sake of argument, maybe they will shrink and maybe they won't, but the choice of inches vs. cm can't affect that; it's extrinsic. This sounds very much like something I've read for decades, that it matters greatly if oil is denominated in dollars, and it's made no sense to me in all that time.

>Everybody who doesn't get new money the Federal Reserve prints under normal circumstances is almost all of the population

People complain about stagnating real wages, but I'm unaware of exponentially declining real wages, let alone the same happening to investments, as you mention, like 401(k)s. I don't see how the details matter; if there was significant wealth transfer from almost everybody, then it would be obvious.

I think you are saying that somehow, in emotional terms, the banks are a vampiric drain on the economy. But how are they doing that? If they somehow make money vanish, then doesn't that mean it isn't circulating and causing buying power and inflation? In which case how can it matter? If all the excess money is being hoarded by a tiny number of people who are not spending it, isn't that protecting us from the ravages of inflation? If I have a trillion dollar coin, regardless of where I got it, it's nothing, unless someone takes it seriously when I say "please make me 10 aircraft carriers".

The idea that financial institutions possess all wealth is so weird I'm not sure I can believe anyone believes it. You can look up how much they are worth, would you say that the published figures are misleading, or do you think that regular public financial companies and banks are vastly outweighed by other entities?
AVL and Red-black trees are pretty terrible and can easily be improved upon by cache-friendlier data structures like for example B-trees.
This part piqued my interest:

> GPT-3 seed prompts can be reverse-engineered, which may become a rude awakening for entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who fund them.

Is there any more information about this? Is the reverse engineering done by hand or is this something that can be coded? Super curious about this point.
My man Paul's always got the goods. This MF got us from algebra all the way to Diffy qs. If it weren't for him and Khan I think half the engineering graduates would've flunked
If your life revolves around acceptance by HN mods, then you need to wakeup from The Matrix!

Nobody wants another cesspool like /. was in its hay day, but ultimately only HackerNews/Ycombinator are harmed by this phenom of over-moderation.

For example, whose brilliant idea was it to create a user community that downvotes on comments hostile to Chinese Communist Party (that aims nuclear weapons at us while supporting North Korea in every sense and planning to kill our trading partners in Hong Kong and Taiwan) or on comments brutally critical of Apple for abusive trade practices? A lot of the downvotes also come from users that are obviously very inexperienced and unable to understand subtle contexts leading one to believe that a great way to solve this “problem” would be to only allow moderation by senior members of the community, as determined by peer votes, not by account age.
it's bloated as hell, active record is nice but good god
This depends on the bank. I've had no trouble exchanging pre-rolled coins for bills at Bank of America.
This is ‘Quantity Theory of Money’, or modelling money as a kind of commodity. I think it is dangerous because it is intuitive, but empirically useless. Fiat currency cannot be thought of as a commodity, rather it is a token or unit of account.

I take what you say as ‘losing buying power’ to mean that a lower quantity of real goods and services can be purchased for the same amount of currency. There isn’t any evidence that this has happened following the Fed’s QE programmes, despite most mainstream economists freaking out about the same point at the time.

The creation or destruction of dollars has no bearing on the purchasing power of the dollars held by anyone else. It is only when new dollars are used to make purchases in excess of existing supply constraints that you create inflation and erode the purchasing power of the currency. That is not to say it is a useless metric, but you need to look at what is being done with the money rather than just looking at the amount outstanding.

Japan is an interesting example of this with 30 years of history to look at. Money supply has expanded by multiples, while consumer prices have remained constant since the mid 1990s.

I also think this fundamentally misrepresents the mechanical operations taking place when the federal reserve “prints money” (guessing to mean QE). They are simply creating dollars to purchase bonds from the private sector - it is essentially an asset swap. The financial institutions give up their bonds, and gain dollars in return. No new money is injected into the private sector by doing this. The dollars that the banks receive usually just sit in their account at the federal reserve, not doing anything in the real world. Your examples would be more valid if discussing government fiscal stimulus programmes, for example spending $2T on infrastructure, since that is a direct injection of nominal wealth to the private sector.
The Atlantic, American affairs journal, longreads are some.
There was the same research done with Coral reefs [1] and I thought Oregon State University did something similar in forests as well. I can provide some reef sounds if you'd really like to hear :)

[1] https://marine-conservation.org/taking-pulse-of-coral-reefs/
Why did whoever think #FFFFFF text on the #000000 background is a good idea?
See "The Program Dependence Graph and Its Use in Optimization"

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS395T/2009fa/papers/ferr...
Missed an opportunity to call it Wormageddon:)
Ya know, that’s what I would’ve thought as well, but a year or two ago Chase Bank refused to take my loose change. They sent me away with the paper to roll the coins myself to bring back to them
> Cash is also essential for grease/bribes.

Am I not bribing enough people? I've never had to.
> I don't understand what this means. Aren't the victims you are imagining the hypothetical people who have large amounts of money in checking, savings, or literally under their mattress? And maybe this is ignorant, but I really didn't think that was a significant segment of the population.

Yes, they are the victims. They are not a significant segment of the population any more because of the current monetary policy focused on perpetuating artificial demand. Interest rates near 0, constant inflation, and maybe even assets hyperinflation have contributed to decimate not only savings but savers. Now you are a fool if you keep any considerable amount of money in the bank beyond living expenses. This did not use to be the case.
These tools (this, foam, obsidian, remnote, supernote, etc.) seem interesting but I've been hesitant to try any. This HN comment[0] on a Foam post a few weeks ago resonated with me. I feel like my ideas and personal knowledge base in my mind is really dynamic and that the constant addition of information and rearranging or establishing of new relationships between entities will be too much effort.

I think, at least for my use, a more simply knowledge base (e.g. zotero, are.na, etc.) where I'm able to store, categorize, and search for things is the best option, and I'll leave the establishment of relationships to my mind.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667961
No chemical battery that doesn't breathe air will ever be as energy-dense as gasoline.
Ask HN: Is using master/slave terminology anti-diversity?
We got a PR in our repo https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/pull/432 requesting us to change the master/slave terminology to main/subordinate.

I really appreciate the author for bringing this issue up but somehow the main/subordinate doesn't seem right too.

Wondering if people have thought about this. And if yes, what alternative terminology people have been following?
Many years ago I implemented a set of multiple precision integer routines in fortran. For division, I slavishly copied Knuth's routine, using all the sample divisions in his book to test, and it worked fine.
New princes in India went to ashrams to learn all these things or have dedicated gurus.
once upon a time, they would take them if you signed the roll and wrote your account number on it.
Source: https://news.ncsu.edu/2012/09/wms-cockroach-steering/

It might not be the only research lab doing this, but its the one I'm most aware of.
12 years later it seems to have worked out just fine.
Right, it is something like "people of America" vs "Americans". Interesting observation.
I don't think you want to use batteries to store power between seasons, since things like Hydrogen or Methane are cheaper.