skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always found it weird hearing someone call themselves a "perfectionist". My usual challenge has been to ask if they ever achieved anything that was "perfect" (which I take to mean "cannot be improved further")?

With the expected (and common) response of "no", I can only assume that they strive for improvement. Now, it is my belief that majority of people (if not all) strive for improvement, but the important point is what parts of our lives or ourselves we try to improve.

I've never met a person who does focus equally on improving in all areas of their life, so I generally just assume that they have not thought things through and are lying to themselves, or simply they are focusing on things most other people are not. ;-)

Sorry to all the "perfectionists" out there, but I think we are all equally perfectionists, meaning that nobody is! :D
Since many major EU countries share their classified intelligence and surveillance systems with the US (and the reverse) this seems more like political speech than reality. The real reason is to preserve what’s left of tech in the EU but that doesn’t exactly sound as good.

Almost all major countries have surveillance programs. They are perhaps necessary to preserve national security. The hope of democratic countries is to have enough checks and balances on those powers to keep them limited to national security interests and to prevent abuse.
I completely bombed an interview because they gave me a laptop but refused to supply a mouse. Plus the laptop touchpad scrolled in the opposite direction to what I was used to. I felt quite sorry for the interviewers who had to sit silent for ten minutes watching me try to copy a function from one file to another.
I was heavy weed smoker for 4 years. After (supposedly) getting COVID-19 about 2 months ago, I stopped smoking, and 2 weeks after recovery started to smoke again.

However, something have changed and I feel like I'm going to die while I'm high, it's hard to breathe and feel my body isn't as healthy as it was before. I feel more or less ok while I'm sober, though.

Decided to quit yesterday and today I see this article. "Yeah, this is the moment".

So I think some people stopped smoking not because they're afraid of COVID, but because they feel worse now.
I'm pretty sure "responsible for 1% of all web-traffic" puts you in the "special experiences" category :)
"Cancel culture" doesn't mean no word from them for ever after. It means they get demoted, dismissed, let go, fired, etc. People are losing positions, jobs, power, control, income, reputation, titles and whatnot because of various reasons. Usually due to the pressure of a largely invisible mob.

For example the case of Stephen Hsu ( https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/michigan-state-geu-cal... ) ... I have no idea if he's right or not, but it's true he's bad at PR and science communication.

We know how regular big of a backstabbing parade the regular old natural science community is (string theory boo/yaay, money for colliders, SUSY, ITER/fusion vs something else). So it's not a surprise that social-adjacent science is even more hardcore in this regard, but this is likely too much and too fast. Yes, sure activism and change needs momentum, but people will be surprised when the hysteresis rears its head due to over-dampening.

But this has happened already many times (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sociobiology:_The... and here's an another example https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/hoeqyg/stereotype_ac... ) and likely will happen again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, note, I'm not saying we shouldn't raise the bar for public (and semi-public) discourse. For example, as far as I know, adopting Codes of Conduct turned out to be quite okay, it laid the foundation for the way to deal with problems, gave a structure and rules to point at when someone crosses a line.
Writing Components in Twig
I personally would much rather Facebook succeed in this space. I’m extremely apprehensive about TikTok and how China is using the data.

I’m fully aware that Facebook will collect data (possible the same data), but I believe the motives and outcomes are more in my favor when it’s my country doing it.
See this thread: https://twitter.com/js_rubin/status/1283493690741268482

13/ Ironically, then, dismissing cancelling as a “culture” allows critics to not engage with the actual substance of calls for accountability. If it’s a culture, there cannot possibly be reasons behind their desire to hold people accountable.

14/ Side note: Look how often critics of #CancelCulture label their opponents as being a “mob” rather than a movement. A “mob” works off passions and emotion, whereas a movement is an organized effort to change society.

15/ And, by labeling calls for accountability as “culture,” critics draw the same kind of civilizational contrast as early anthropologists. They (often BIPOC) are governed by reflexive culture whereas we (often white) uphold the principles of free speech and rational debate.
> People calling on someone to be fired, after all, have free speech rights themselves

Somehow the "everything is free speech and nobody should ever be censored" arguers forget this.
And authorities still recommending 2.0 children for some reason. Global logistics still not optimized.
Right, because all these other parties would totally not think Twitter might be hacked? I'm truly baffled by this kind of hysteria.
I used to be reasonably good at algorithmic stuff in university 20 years ago. Since then I hardly ever practice. It's not that I am bad at them, now, but its just so hit and miss whether an answer will come to me in time, you might as well toss a coin. If I was doing algorithmic stuff every day I have no doubt I would be better. Usually what happens is I get out of an interview and a an answer (or a better answer than I gave) pops into my head. Like I say, might as well toss a coin.
If they actually wanted bitcoin yeah, if they wanted to show that twitter is vulnerable not so much
> Was the mainstream media ever objective or impartial?

"Objective" or "impartial" were never descriptive - they were aspirational. It's a philosophy that says "check your assumptions" and "let the reader draw conclusions." It's this aspiration that appears to be leaving the industry.

I recently saw an article in the NY Times.

Headline: "Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are A Major Source of Cases." Body (summarized): 650 cases linked to churches and religious events since the start of the pandemic.

I believe this was published on the same day that the US crossed 3,000,000 cases, meaning that this "major source of cases" was linked to 0.022% of all cases.

So, why I brought this up. Is there a fully objective way to share this news? Of course not - the very act of publishing an article about church transmission is political - looking for that data was a result of bias. But there clearly was a more objective way to publish it, by changing the title from one that's so obviously bullshit to one that just shares the facts.

Edit: it appears that NYT changed the headline 2 days after publishing.
DDG search, top result is the old headline, click through and it has a new one: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=churches+were+eager+to+reopen+site...
Jonathan Clem from the GitHub Actions team joins me for a jam session
The problem is the relative social status between the client and Geon.

If the client had heart palpitations and Geon was a cardiologist, this wouldn't happen. You would not have Mr Alpha explaining to the doctor how he needs to do the scan and the surgery, and being very cross when he didn't get his way. Even though Mr Alpha probably cares more about his heart working than a user interface.

The same goes for pilots and other professionals, they get less crap than they would if they didn't have some sort of status that prevents most of the I-know-best crowd from sticking their heads in.

For some reason, software doesn't have that feel to it. In many places, it's a sort of implementation detail, where the generals have already decided the strategy, and the devs just have to follow the orders.

It would be good with some cultural change around what people think devs do and what you can say to them.
Things I wish I had known when I started programming, Part 5 (2019)
How to Find a Profitable Niche to Launch a New Business
Don’t Judge a Substack by Its Cover
Voting misinformation flourishes on Facebook
>I've seen some electron apps that run like dogs

And almost no Qt apps run like that. "As long as I don't notice it most of the time, it's not slow." No, sorry, I don't agree. Frameworks should be fast. Slack is unforgivably slow.

>I think you mean the difference between SoA and AoS.

I mean literally in the interview when they do a nested for loop over primitives. Do they lose marks for going row-first? Why isn't that considered a basic rule? It's not complicated. Most interviewers don't even realise there's a difference (!!).

>I doubt optimising for DSPs/SIMD/big-data to maximize throughput and reduce cache-misses, is something the typical FAANG employee needs to know about.

Twitter is so bad it crashes my browser. It's 90% text! The only ram-hogs are auto-playing videos that dissapear after you scroll past them. These engineers are paid half a million per year. Half the time the website doesn't even load (!!!). That's insane.

>And you can optimise your in-memory data-structures (and database IO) later

Ehh, skeptical. Unless your data & algorithms are structured as contiguous arrays of primitives to begin with you're going to have trouble refactoring the abstraction.
Implicit in your comment is the idea that mainstream media needs to survive.

The news corporations chose money over morals. They decided to become clickbait tabloids to chase ad revenue. I don't think anything of value would be lost if we saw some of these media giants go under.
Shipping Const Generics in 2020
I guess then, the question is: Why does nobody on the github staff have a similar experiences to me, when they (assumingly) operate at even higher scales?

Or, if they do, why were they not in on the design meetings? Or, if they were, why were they ignored?
Note that this isn't highlighting any new information, the article itself was from 2017 and was itself referring to earlier studies.

(Not to discount the overall thesis which is basically "muscle mass good," but if you're relatively up to date on this sort of thing there's nothing novel in this article for you).
If the rest of the world is oil-independent, I imagine it will truck on regardless of any post-oil chaos in the former oil-producing regions.
> Why isn't it like that?

Because most of us don't care. I need my code editor to just work out of the box. I want to be able to write code and install a few plugins to enhance the tools I'm using. Hacking my editor is a waste of my time and even if I wanted to, I'm certainly not going to learn lisp to do it.
They modified 30 accounts each with millions of followers , most of them verified , even a simple weight for that should have triggered alarms
People aren't perfect, but I believe journalists can at least make a good faith effort to put both sides of a story. Or be open about whether they want to be an activist with a byline or not.
I think they have proven that it works with thousands of YouTube videos with the same scam and basically the same operating mode (impersonating famous people). They have made quite a lot of money.

So they are probably on at least their second attack vector by now.

I mean, who knows, based on the massive number of imposter YouTube stream BTC giveaway scams, this might be a whole sub-industry in India by now. Similar to fake virus scams etc.
This way you can be consistently disappointed! Jokes aside, the complexity of this kinds of applications is not easy to grasp until you see stuff like this
"I'm glad that I can eat a meat-and-dairy-based diet and am not forced to fill my calories with garbage plant-based substitutes."

Must they be garbage substitutes? Must your vegetabilic food look and taste like a meat facsimile? I hear this perspective often from meat-eaters when they contrast their diet to a vegetarian diet, and I cannot understand it.
I was hoping Geon was going to do a psychological trick to make the client happy, but nope... "the trick" is to just stop caring (spoilers).

With people like Alpha you have to be very strict about adhering to the contract and not an iota more.

It's like the classic meme:

"I design everything": $100

"I design, you watch": $200

"I design, you help": $500

"You design, I help": $1000

"You design, I watch": $5000

"You design everything": $10000
The level of productivity per capita in the economy today is vastly more than enough to supply our entire population with only a fraction working.

There's also plenty of information indicating that if given the choice, most people actually want to work...they just don't want to be working shit jobs for shit pay for shit bosses.
I find it odd talking about objectivity in journalism without addressing the issue of narratives that create facts rather than facts creating a narrative. When a narrative is allowed to create facts what usually happens are lies which represent bias of the author and publication (which is supposed to fact check).

The article talk both about alternative facts and value loaded language, but outside of intended bias where news paper are directly involved with a political party, narrative generated facts are likely the culprit for most alternative facts.

Looking at old news papers I think I see much less of narrative designed articles. It might still be biased for all I know, but they seems to be less about trying to tell me a coherent narrative that will draw me in and more about writing up what happened and who said what. The stories seems to generally lack narrative structure, and maybe that allows the author to avoid falling into the trap of filling in facts which does not exist.
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

The 48 Rules of Power - Robert Greene

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams

Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell

The World Is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

The Penguin History of the World: Sixth Edition - J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad
Yes. It exacerbates the inequality because most of the top-50 richest PTA schools can afford extras that boost student engagement or provide in-class assistance via teaching assistants thus lowering the student:teacher ratio.

When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public schools is generally objectively better compared to students at public schools without the extra budget. The year-over-year budget boosts are profound.
What about historical scenarios like:

* I think that slavery is immoral, but I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore.

* I'm {gay, lesbian, ...} but everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore.

* I think that the Holy Trinity should have {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...} members, but I get in trouble if I say that, so I just won't say it anymore.

* I think that {capitalism, communism} is {good, bad} but everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore.
Almost all countries have surveillance programs - from the EU to the US to China. They are arguable necessary to maintain national security.

The difference is not that a country surveils but if they have processes in place to protect that information from abuse and keep it to use only for national security interests.
The top 10% is people who earn over $18,000/year, which probably includes most of HackerNews readers:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...

Keep in mind that this richest 10% contribute the majority of humanity's value-added commerce and production, cultural output, and scientific output.

For example, Romania has an equal scientific output to Pakistan: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs

Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger.

When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.
Yes, I remember one guy asking what I would when a page was going slow. I explained how I would work backwards checking the network tab in the browser, make sure it was the endpoint that was the bottleneck, blah blah blah to the database. He just wanted me to say "use explain" - which i would have got to if he had bothered listening a couple more minutes. Then he wanted me to do a "challenge" that was expected to take around 10 hours. No thanks, you didn't convince me I want to work for you.
> This is not yours software, you are just allowed to use it,

Oh but keep in mind in some cases I'm not given a choice. If I could not use snap for example, I would not. But it was forced upon me. So I have every right to be annoyed at someone figuratively taking a shit on my porch.

Anyways this discussion has depleted itself, you have no good arguments protecting that nonstandard behaviour.
Designing an Evergreen Cache with Change Data Capture
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
I have nearly as many answers to this questions as books I have read. Even fiction helps you to understand another perspective, which I think is really one of the great things about reading.

One of the earliest books that gave me a good leap in understanding is the Tao of Pooh. As a preteen, it was my first real taste of philosophy outside of Christianity, and it was something radically different.

As far as impact, probably Epictetus' Enchiridion. It's literally a manual on how to live a good life. It's uncommonly practical advice and started a love for his school of philosophy that still hasn't faded.
Depending on the tone that could show a lot of self awareness. I’d respond “I totally understand! That’s why we said at the get go this stuff is hard. Sometimes we can’t see what we want till we try to build it. Let’s figure out what’s off about this and setup some more sprints.”
Would that 'science' happen to be the very productive discussion of reminding transgenders of their birth sex every day a la Ben Shapiro?
... are you going to be able to define this at all? Or are you going to make it illegal to report e.g. someone saying the N-word to their employer?
Big companies just like legislation that is clear, won't be challenged and doesn't change (too) much. Allows them to commit resources without the goalposts changing.
I'm not a physicist but it's hard to have a thought experiment where you introduce ideas like ignoring materials strength, because that could be a factor in what relativity would make it do.

Anyway as you approach the speed of light the energy required to accelerate approaches infinity, so you would just not get it there because of the energy requirement.

I think a simpler version of this experiment is a really long rigid rod. What happens if you pick one end of the rod to be the axis and then you try to rotate the rod about the axis? https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/455189/rotating-...
==But today they're rabidly and without much self reflection trying to destroy any opposition to creating a society at large that strictly conforms to their vision for the world.==

This assumes that every member of the “mainstream media” (an oft-used, but rarely defined phrase) shares the exact same viewpoint. That seems bizarre given that they are direct competitors. They are driven by money more than ideology.

We keep blaming “the media” for our ails when all they do is show us the things we want. Maybe we should look in the mirror?
The World Needs a Cash-for-Coal-Clunkers Program
'Almost certain' Russians sought to interfere in 2019 UK election – UK Gov
All three books by Yuval Noah Harari.
Case in point, this very comment!
Objectivity will be subjective even outside of the communication model described in Manufacturing Consent.

Ie, you can read the French newspaper, "Canard Enchaine" and verify that it doesn't tick the checkboxes of the five filters of editorial bias. Nonetheless that's a very opinionated newspaper. Opinions are by definition subjective. And, as even Chomsky acknowledged, journalists intentions are in the majority good. But, like we are, are very much trapped in an unavoidable ideology.
People forget that the reason this happens is that most countries have laws against spying domestically. They usually don't have laws prohibiting them from taking data from other spy agencies spying on their own country. So the cheap and easy workaround is you let your friends spy on you for you. It's usually pretty critical for counterintelligence anyway. As the first place an enemy tries to get into is the counterintelligence department.
That's probably why the first Privacy Shield was capitalized, but the second was not.
The game is not the issue but the implication that crime is linked to black people.
>To report on practically any political event, even for a simple factual description of what happened, you have to decide which of a variety of contradictory sources is correct

It would be more like, "This campaign held an event at X location, here's a 90 minute uncut video of the stage" and that's the entire post. No quotes, official statements, no conclusions by reporters, just that it happened with proof. The weather isn't perfect either, but we could strip out 95% of what's in most news reports. It's not completely free from bias, but there's no proof true objectivity exists in journalism. All news is biased against people who reflexively deny the obvious (like the earth is flat).

Politics is tricky anyway because people intentionally lie, so you go from trying to sort out bias to actually discovering lies. That kind of reporting cannot be unbiased because you think they're lying and they pretend they're not.
Or allow prices to rise and people will choose to eat less meat on their own.
They used multiple wallets. They also posted a bunch of useless/ridiculous comments and memes, not sure why would anyone do that if the attack was carefully planned and automated.
Something I see more and more is a primary key based on guid/uuid;

I'm not fully aware of the merits of either approach, so I'm just putting the info I have at hand out there.
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

edit: I should mention this is a book recommended by Yuval Noah Harari himself. I read it myself and it is a great companion to his fantastic books.
Boosting internet speed in rural Britain
Ask HN: Why do this: “Please mention the word 'crane' in your application”?
I saw a job ad for a startup role which among the list of requirements specifies: "Please mention the word 'crane' in your application". Have you seen this before? Any idea why it's done? What do you think of this practice?
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.