skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If we take a top-level player, and make them fight a high-level, mid-level and low-level player repeatedly until we can become statistically confident of their win rates against each, there is no reason why their win rates would fit an exponential curve.

When I first read this, I thought to myself "well we get to pick the scores, so it's exponential by definition". The problem becomes more clear when you express it without any reference to the scores.

If Player A wins 80% of the time against Player B, and Player B wins 80% of the time against Player C, how often does Player A win against Player C? This is a question purely in terms of observables. Elo makes a prediction here (94.1% of the time) and it can be either right or wrong. If it's wrong, then there is no valid assignment of scores.
Another example would be competitive overwatch where the developer's stated goal was an equal distribution of rated players throughout the various ranks (bronze/silver/gold/platinum/diamond/masters/grandmasters). They tweaked the variables until they got their desired distribution, lumping the majority of players in gold and plat. Ranking up became an exercise in either playing hundreds of hours or starting a brand new account with fresh MMR.

Predictably this led to an explosion in boosting and win-trading services.
The Need for Speed: Sending 2M Messages per Minute
Wait, I thought the reserve ratio was set to zero for the first time this year, because of the pandemic?
Like MIDI
It could also be less than $100k a month (e.g. 2500 c5a.large with a 1-year reservation). At that point you'd wonder why your monitoring bill was 40% of your compute bill.

Also, of course their salary is relevant. The cost of an engineer's time is an important factor to consider when making build vs buy decisions. Usually it's one that argues in favor of "buy", but not always.
The replacement they're going with, "client hints", is weird in its own way. Suppose you render your website server-side, and suppose you use different templates for desktop and mobile. You then have to determine the kind you want before any response is sent, but the new method prevents you from doing that; you have to send a response to ask the browser to send the mobile flag in a subsequent request. You'd have to use ugly workarounds for that. One that comes to mind is to issue a redirect to the requested URL itself, but ask for the additional headers. Not optimal because it adds a round-trip and I'm not sure it'll work at all. User agent strings aren't pretty but they make this kind of detection extremely easy and straightforward.

And "actual feature detection" doesn't work with SSR, like, at all.
(should have included all the great Canadian universities in the list too, my apologies ... not that I included all the great US universities)
Yes, and we're all susceptible to emotion to some degree, no matter the age and no matter the education.

There has been extensive research done in public relations, advertising and consumer psychology how to manipulate people emotionally and make them act against reason.

A bit of training in logical thinking is definitely not enough to counter this.
Would love to use it, but I need something comparable to PrimeNG. Are there any comprehensive UI toolkits out there already?
While we go through a vetting process for all applicants, pools are ultimately formed through a peer-selection process based on ranking. The presence of top tier VC backers is one of several major factors a founder will rank with.
Researchers Discover Two Paths of Aging and New Insights on Promoting Healthspan
In certain communities, players will choose ranked vs. unranked almost always. I agree that a ranked + custom lobby model should exist though.
No. Credit, as in implied future payment, literally does mean loan, and another meaning of the word (opposite of debit) is also what happens when you use a credit card - an intermediate credits the merchant account so you don't need a separate line of credit for each one.

You're making the same not-even-faulty assumption as the article author, that a word with several related meanings is somehow wrong or a trick or at all tough for the average person to comprehend.
This is a problem of not having enough reserves, and not quite of lending deposits. Banks encourage people to put their money in the bank in exchange for deposits so that they have these reserves.

It’s like the article says: banks give out deposits in exchange for Government Cash, or for Valuable Long Term Promises. A run can kill a bank if they read the market wrong and can’t generate enough government cash to redeem the deposits.
Does it use JavaScript etc?
Your simplified and mischaracterized bad faith argument is the reason why i dont comment on online forums. If you havent learnt to read and think dispassionately, I'm not going to teach you.
This was a great answer, thank you.
You've got a lot of broken references (??) in that preprint, BTW.

I think I understand why you're putting in the learned derivative operator, but I think it's rarely desirable. Computing derivatives with compatibility properties is a well-studied domain (e.g., finite element exterior calculus), as is tensor invariance theory (e.g., Zheng 1994, though this subject is sorely in need of a modern software-centric review). When the exact theory is known and readily computable, it's hard to see science/engineering value in "learned" surrogates that merely approximate the symmetries.

More generally, it is disheartening to see trends that would conflate discretization errors with modeling errors, lest it bring back the chaos of early turbulence modeling days that prompted this 1986 Editorial Policy Statement for the Journal of Fluids Engineering. https://jedbrown.org/files/RoacheGhiaWhite-JFEEditorialPolic...
Creating a custom system to suit your situations needs sounds great and the thought process was fun to read, but some of the claims lobbed here are pretty questionable.

Specifically, the claim that Dota's matchmaking system is "probably wrong" because the model chosen doesn't match your own findings feels like a reach. Sibling commenters have pointed out how skill variance is important to allow the ELO system to function in games like chess. Additionally, someone else pointed out that the sigmoid function is similar to a linear funciton close to zero.

It seems at least as likely that Acolytefight doesn't have a high enough level of skill expression present in the game to see top players "curve out" weaker players, rather than exponential functions mapping player skill to be useless or wrong.

Does elo suck? Maybe, but this hasn't convinced me.
One of the reasons I haven't been able to fully commit to Linux on the desktop is that I haven't been able to find quality music production tools. I always end up going back to macOS because I miss Logic Pro X and Ableton Live too much. Also the audio routing in macOS is so much easier than any other operating system I've encountered. I would love to hear about music studios using FOSS.
Hi!

I made this website to present COVID-19 data in a clean and simple UI.

Many websites show similar data, but I found they often require a lot of clicks or scrolling to find the information I want (e.g. plot case counts for every state in the U.S.). Wanted to share in case it would be useful to others as well.

Happy to hear any feedback / feature requests!

---

Pages:

* Case Counts: https://coviddashboard.eugenectang.com/casecounts

* Treatments: https://coviddashboard.eugenectang.com/treatments

* Vaccines: https://coviddashboard.eugenectang.com/vaccines

Data Sources:

* Case counts from Johns Hopkins University

* Vaccine and Treatment data from the Milken Institute
I guess he'll be selling a bunch of Tesla shares to pay the tax on those options.
Since the Go compiler is so primitive you can strongly influence the size of the program by just restructuring it. An example: if you have a function that converts integer return codes to errors, and you have another function that calls it a lot:

func codeToError(i int) error {
switch i {
case ...
...
}
}

func stuff() error {
if rv := callJunk(); rv < 0 {
return codeToError(rv)
}

if rv := moreJunk(); rv < 0 {
return codeToError(rv)
}

...

return nil
}

You're going to get multiple whole copies of the inner function inlined into the outer one. This can add up, if the outer function is long and/or if the inner switch statement is huge.

You can save a lot of code by jumping through an adapter function instead, like:

func callWithErrorsConverted(f func() int, g func(int) error) error {
return g(f())
}

... because now the compiler doesn't get to inline g into f. These things make a big difference in whole-program size. I wrote about it in the context of tailscale and protobufs here:

https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Bloaty-Puffs-and-the-Go-Compil...
Pandas Project: Make a Gradebook with Python and Pandas – Real Python
LinkedIn keeps suggesting me my mother who passed away 4 years ago. Every week, without fail, I get an email telling me that I should totally connect with her. It’s highly annoying and no matter what I do to my email preferences, I keep getting the same damn email.
In Ireland, you make a lodgement when you are paying into a bank.

I was in disbelief when I first realised that no-one in the UK knows what a lodgement is.
I'll add on since this is the most informative post so far (and I've written a static binary re-writer to add shadow stack protection to an existing binary).

A shadow stack is a limited subset of the call stack that only stores return addresses. In normal operation, Every time your compiled program makes a function call, it stores the return address on the main call stack (modulo certain compiler optimizations) so that when the called function returns, your program can resume executing directly after the point at which it called the function.

With a shadow stack, when a function is called, the return address is copied to a separate "shadow" stack as well as the call stack. When the called function returns, the return address on the two stacks are compared and the program fails if they are different.

In new Intel microprocessors, the shadow stack is implemented in hardware. The numerous corner cases require software support that the article describes.
I'm sorry, I don't get it. Could you elaborate?
Python 101 – Debugging Your Code with Pdb – The Mouse vs. the Python
The basic concept behind accounting, the T represents the balance sheet which must be balanced at all time, and every change in the balance sheet is always a tuple of two operations, either on both sides of the balance sheet, or on two lines of the same side.

So if you start with an empty balance sheet and a customer comes with cash to deposit, your first operation is: increase deposits | increase cash.

Then the bank lends money to a borrower: decrease cash | increase loans to customers.

Then the borrower pays an interest: increase cash | increase equity

Then you pay some interest to the depositor: decrease cash | decrease equity

etc.
Floods Force China to Blow Up Dam to Protect World’s Largest Hydroelectric Plant
This is an extremely vague retort.

Are you proposing the government should have no attached requirements to qualify for subsidies?

Are you flatly against all regulation when a particular company is given tax money?

For what it's worth, the government can regulate any industry regardless of whether it is subsidized.
What's wrong with "Earth orbits the sun"?
What is deep OS integration in browsers?
Bureaucracy will never be efficient. It is resilient and can survive. It is an organism. It presses itself into the cracks and crevices of society until it seems like the essential material composing our structure. But it's not, it's just slime mold.
I must be the odd one out because I couldn't jive with the course's presentation style when I tried to take it to see what the hype was all about. It felt like Joel Osteen was trying to teach me computer science. I don't mean to be flippant and don't read too much into that comment (it's just what came to mind), but it's just that the slicked up, overly produced style just turns me off from learning. I much prefer a calmer environment and a lecturer that seems like I could have a relaxed conversation with. The course feels like it's selling me something.

I also don't understand why the course seems to cover everything and the kitchen sink. It covers a rather wide swath of material and programming languages. It's my personal learning and teaching style that courses should be more focused and concise. The course content also seems very trendy and software engineering job-oriented, and I think learning should be removed from trends. My fear is that students will come out of the course with a very narrow view of computer science such that they think C, Python, HTML/CSS/JS, SQL are the only games in town.

Are MLs (SML, Ocaml, F#) or Lisps/Schemes mentioned at all in this course? I don't even see the point in teaching C as an intro language anymore. Python as well, which has nothing going for it as a language aside from library support and industry use.

I'd be interested in how both students and other professors at Harvard feel about the course's success given their experience in courses that follow.
>Slowly, this amount (the "reserve rate) was lowered to 0% under Obama.

Source for this? AFAIK it was done this year, under trump not obama.

>As of March 2020, the minimum reserve requirement for all deposit institutions was abolished, or more technically, fixed to zero percent of eligible deposits. The Board previously mandated a zero reserve requirement for banks with eligible deposits up to $16 million, 3% for banks up to $122.3 million, and 10% thereafter. The removal of reserve requirements followed the Federal Reserve's shift to an "ample-reserves" system, in which the Federal Reserve Banks pay member banks interest on reserves that they keep in excess of the required amount

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement#United_Sta...
4 Azure Services to Improve Performance of Applications
Exploring Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Access to raw USB devices is a good example I suppose.
I haven't used Vue extensively since what was probably v1 so I'm likely the wrong person to comment on this.

That said, I find that Svelte aligns more with my/our team's mental model about how the web should work and that is why went with it for our sites.

Just like with Vue you can write your JS/CSS/HTML in a single file, but the reactivity and state management is much easier to reason about than what we've seen elsewhere.

- `$:` is great.

- Stores and derived stores are amazing.

- Data binding / rerendering is really intuitive.

That said, the biggest headache in building our own SSG was getting SSR/Hydration working well, but that was mainly fighting Webpack and got easier when we went with Rollup.

edit: formatting.
Lots of valid critique for this piece. Will add that "state money" and "bank money" is a poor way to talk about credit.

In terms of references, tons and tons and tons of prior art defining money and so forth. A book I recently enjoyed a great deal is:

The Nature Of Money, Geoffrey Ingham

https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Money-Geoffrey-Ingham/dp/07456...

And this more recent Bank of England paper is exceptional:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position
I don’t have a link to a comprehensive list but my personal suggestions are:

* GIMP for photo editing

* Krita for freehand drawing and for CMYK support

* Inkscape for vector images

* Scribus for desktop publishing (booklets, flyers etc)

* Blender for 3D graphics (modelling/rigging/animation) [1]

* Blender for 2D animation [1]

* Blender for video editing [1]

* Blender for compositing [1]

[1] Basically Blender is expanding in fields that are outside of 3D graphics and I believe that over time it became the best alternative in those fields.
ASLRing text segments is optional, but possible. There are negative performance tradeoffs.
Neat! Hadn't heard of M3DB before, but cursory poke around the docs seems like it's a pretty solid solution/approach.

My current use case isn't monitoring, or even time series anymore, but will keep M3DB in mind next time I have to seriously push a time series/monitoring solution.
I had to lookup the school. Maybe it's better known in some regional markets? It's behind a few names I was familiar with in Canada. [0]

[0] https://cwur.org/2019-2020.php
Probably zero-fee index funds or target date funds.
Build Boring Software
I disagree it could ever be just an edge case because the use case hasn't disappeared and will likely never disappear. Blog posts come to mind as an obvious example, but also encyclopedias, research... Anything that simply needs to transfer nearly pure information instead of providing interaction.

Of course the app use case has grown tremendously and is probably the more important one for casual users which are growing in number in relative terms, so I understand where the sentiment comes from.
Working only with OEMs makes the company vulnerable to fewer clients.
> just generate, in a loop, a series of assemblies that each purport compatibility with Windows ABI vX.Y.Z

The Microsoft developers already thought of that trick. What you declare is not compatibility with "Windows ABI vX.Y.Z"; you declare compatibility with an UUID which represents that Windows version. That is, if you're compatible with Windows 8 you say "I'm compatible with 4a2f28e3-53b9-4441-ba9c-d69d4a4a6e38", if you're compatible with Windows 8.1 you say "I'm compatible with 1f676c76-80e1-4239-95bb-83d0f6d0da78", and so on. Since you cannot predict the UUID for future Windows versions, you cannot pretend to be compatible with them.
The point is that at that level of revenue, even the smallest contribution pays itself back.
I think it's more complicated than that, all of these roles come with substantial amounts of near unilateral executive power that can impact the way the country is run for decades to come.

Even all of the existing US government tech posts like the USDS and 18F are ultimately there purely to service the needs of a bureaucratic agency and their particular management.

For a technology specific role to have the same level of prestige as someone on the federal bench or leading the FBI, they'd need to be giving them unilateral regulatory powers over the broader technology industry in the country.
I'm not sure if this is just me, but the demos all fail because they try to load https://code.datagridxl.com/datagridxl.js and it's returning a 404.
Can't do anything but agree. The intelligence budget, as you said, is enormous so there will certainly be things that come out of it that would be shaky business decisions to even attempt in the private sector.

For one, GPS was created by the DoD and I am still blown away that it is so good, accessible, and free for consumer use.
So diversification is only for the investors but never permitted for the founders? Financial security for me, but financial risk for thee? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, that's the financial system as a whole; people who have property moving risk onto people who do the actual work at every turn.
Why even use the word "glitch"?
I thought MIT mostly only opens access to old recorded videos.
Amazing article. I love reading well documented history. Thanks for sharing, is your book on Amazon?
Our company (not Microsoft, but a bit larger) used this model for over 15 years; it worked better than the replacement model, where people only get fired when they are really bad, so really weak people accumulate and re-baseline the competency in the company. On top of that, the new model based on diversity removed almost completely competency from promotions, so it is very easy to stay at the top of the peer group due to lack of competitors.
Interestingly, money creation is done by making loans. But nobody mentions the converse: money destruction is done by paying off the loans!

Fractional reserve banking is an amazing invention.
this is an extremely overused fortune-cookie like quote. There's a legitimate distinction to be made between intelligence on one hand, and simply computation or calculation on the other. If we start calling every numerical method AI we're rendering the term meaningless.
You shouldn’t remove your package from PyPI
Sure it could but if the intention of the developer is to run the API call only once per mount, never otherwise, it would be more appropriate to throw an error instead of just adding pointless dependencies. It just seems like a dumb overhead which goes against the actual goals of the developer.
The confusion is that modern commercial banks don’t work like a giant vault. So applying the analogy you described to, say, Wells Fargo, would mislead you about how Wells Fargo works.

You could have a bank that does what you say, but it wouldn’t be able to survive as a commercial institution.
How does your self-employed career compare to a parallel salaried career in your industry across 20 years? (In terms of year-averaged income, hours worked, etc.)
Whole page is around 5KB with three requests, one of which is the favicon. Browsers are fast when you just give them (mostly) regular ol’ HTML. The network, rendering nutty CSS with animations and gradients everywhere, rendering SVG, “hero” videos, giant PNGs, putting JavaScript between the browser and rendering HTML—those are slow.
one thing is that datagridxl.js does not support formulas but jexcel does
The Army's Mass Twitch Bans Might Be Unconstitutional
Windows uses relocations, not PIC, to enable different load addresses. That means the image in memory has its self references patched by adding the difference between compiled in load address and runtime load address. System DLLs can still share code with one another as long as they share the same load address in different processes for that reboot of the operating system.

Historically EXEs were either linked without relocations or had relocations stripped. They were always loaded first so ended up where they wanted, no relocation necessary. But /dynamicbase flag to linker opts in to setting a bit in the PE header and retaining relocations, so the EXE can be loaded elsewhere.

TL;DR: Windows supports ASLR on both executables and dynamic libraries.
There seems to be this meme that hyperinflation is always painful. Long-term hyperinflation is painful because nobody wants your currency and that causes all kinds of problems.

Short-term hyperinflation is short-term disruptive, but it also has the result of effectively wiping out your debts (which would be helpful on net to most in the US, including the government), and then people just adjust to the new prices, which are higher but become stable, and wages rise to compensate.

The main loss to the US from not being the reserve currency would be that they couldn't keep printing even more money without incurring the normal amount of inflation that usually implies for everybody else. But that's assuming the rest of the world is even interested in handing that power to somebody else. And who would that be? Everybody wants it to be themselves, which is what nobody else wants. Meanwhile all the powerful international holders of US debt have a huge interest in it continuing to be the US, since they're the ones the wiping out of dollar-denominated debts would hurt the most.

And none of that seems especially likely in the immediate future, because the Fed is doing all it can right now to prevent deflation, by keeping interest rates on the floor and printing a ton of money. It would be so easy for them to prevent inflation right now that all they would have to do is stop actively doing half the things they're doing to prevent its opposite. So it only happens if they want it to.