skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i wonder if this is even legally allowed
Back when it was popular to have a flat structure or no managers or whatever I started suggesting "Every type of management works until money gets tight." I think the principle still applies, but a more useful/general version is pick your structures and processes around resource availability (good vs bad times):

Good Times: pick something that can amplify abundant resources. There is going to be less bureaucracy around decisions and spending so move quickly and place lots of bets while you can.

Bad Times: pick something that works with meagre resources. You're going to spend more time justifying spending.
People have been living in standalone houses longer than I've been alive. People have been flying for vacation longer than I've been alive. Maybe we should work on those things, but they are not new, and (right or wrong) could even be argued to have been a measure of living standards for quite a long time.

What hasn't been around longer than I've been alive is a new way to make coffee have far more environmental impact than it used to. We're supposed to be making things better, not worse. So, yeah, I can be high and mighty about your new way to needlessly generate trash while still living in a standalone house, and not a bit of cognitive dissonance in sight.
I mean, if there was a public tender there's little to complain, if there wasn't then it seems right to, even if it's "a drop in the ocean".

And frankly nobody thinks "wow, Germany has a working COVID app" since almost everyone else has it too. Even Italy, amongst a ton of screw ups, has managed to produce a perfectly fine open source contact tracing app.
Poor impulse control (aka high time preference in econ-speak) is what keeps these people poor. It also makes them to value instant gratification of consuming sugary drinks more than long-term benefits to health resulting from refraining from consuming sugary drinks. Taxes will do nothing to fix this common cause, since they change only the effect.
Ask HN: How did you choose an idea to work on?
I have a ton of ideas and no issues executing them (I have the technical ability and drive to work on things). My problem is figuring out how to pick one thing to focus on. They're all generally good ideas, and with dedication each one could become something useful. However, I'm constantly doing multiple projects because everything interests me. I know if I put all my effort into one thing I'd get so much more done.

Does anyone have experience with this? Any methods on how to choose an idea to pursue? Maybe specific criteria to evaluate each one on? I would appreciate any guidance or advice on this.
I often use this method: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXMath/blob/83634c742a85d1...

Similar code with optional double precision support and more options: https://www.geometrictools.com/GTE/Mathematics/CosEstimate.h

If you don’t like C++, both of them are fairly simple to port to C.
>The biggest difference is the price drop of it?

Yeah pretty much. The lords are worried that the peasants can afford repeating firearms now and the well to do peasants are worried that the status quo might be upset.
16 + 26 = 42 [1] [2]

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16+%2B+26

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)#The_Hitchhiker's_G...
Reusable bags aren't even allowed in Massachusetts. I'd be surprised if that changed anytime soon and who knows if the laws requiring you to pay for "multi-use" plastic bags in some locales if you don't bring your own will "ever" end up being reinstated.
Hey folks, author here. I'd love feedback – I'm also happy to answer any questions and/or debate!
Did any European country declared themselves prepared in any way other than to placate public opinion?

I am sure that they knew full well that they weren't prepared (Reports from previous years that said exactly were leaked or mentioned in the media), and the initial and continued reaction to Covid-19 in my view showed very plainly that they were not prepared.

When the shit actually hit the fan, as it did at the beginning of the year they went into panic/damage control mode. At that point PR is to keep everyone calm and to save the government if possible. Showing up on TV and saying "yep this is going to be shit and we're not prepared. Good bless you all." is not something any government is going to do.

I think the delusion really is to think that it wouldn't happen, either on their watch or at all. The example in France shows that very well: They knew that masks would be needed in case of pandemic, but they clearly saw no urgency in maintaining a state of readiness.

We're in fact very lucky that Covid-19 is actually not that bad. Thinking about it, this is what's terrifying.
There's an explanation and video[1]; I remember thinking the same a few years ago.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-curiosity-mars-rover-...
Except it's like printers, Nestlé is losing money on most Nespresso machines, so if users start buying significantly fewer original capsules it'll threaten the ecosystem.
Yes, I would fail any sort of math exam if I used the GPT-3 model.
Thanks for looking! You may be right but I have the feeling of two separate memories, one about the more famous typewriter story, and one about this Xerox thing. Oh well.
If nobody's going to answer you, your position wins regardless.
Scribd has an English translation of Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas, titled The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. I'm fluent in Portuguese (though not a native speaker) but couldn't get through the beginning of the original.
I work in the travel industry as a programmer (god only knows for how much longer) - I can tell you that Sabre and other GDS's are only used if you go through a travel agent or use some online reservation systems. If you book through the airline's systems or on online reservation systems they likely use the airline's systems to track travel instead of GDS since the GDS wants to take a big cut of every ticket sale. And obviously only legacy travel companies like Hertz and Mariott integrate with GDS's, new travel companies Uber and Airbnb likely don't have any relationship with Sabre.

You're only likely to be in a Sabre system if you've been booked by your company through a travel agent and rent using legacy car/hotel companies also through your company's travel agent.
That's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that privacy and security don't depend on where your data is located.

The location of your server or whether third parties have access to that server one way or another should not be part of your security concept.

My point is that if you have end-to-end encryption and don't store or share unencrypted data in the first place, it doesn't matter where your server is.

There is no particular country in the world where you can place your Tor relay or your storage server and be safe against being spied on.

To use the obligatory car allegory since it's Germany we're talking about: an unlocked car with the keys in the ignition isn't any safer against theft if you park it next to a police station. On the other hand you can park a locked car with a live pitbull inside (in the shade!) pretty much anywhere in town and the risk of theft will be equally low.
I'd be ecstatic with a monochrome 20"+ eink monitor for use after 8:00PM or so. With the F.lux settings I use on my normal monitor it's practically monochrome anyway.

7FPS is probably not quite high enough, but I've seen 10-13" displays with 15-20FPS, and that would be fine for normal computing.

I'd probably swap my scrollwheel for PageUp/PageDown to make full page refreshes a little more pleasant though.
What We Lose When Retail Stores Disappear
Same sort of generative probabilistic model idea.
Can't the free market sort that out?
I think it depends on the company, AstraZeneca CEO already said a while ago they will be manufacturing this at cost or near cost, this is a time for big pharma to give back. Some drug companies like Gilead though have very high markup, paid by the taxpayer.

And some bioteh companies with mRNA vaccines in phase 1/2 trials like Moderna and Biontech, or protein treatment like Synairgen have seen share prices skyrocket.

I guess the assumption is they will be collecting fees from the IP and/or future contracts for other drugs if this works out.
Historic perspective aside, this is a current issue as well.

After all, housing prices and the stock markets in general keep going up as more money keeps being “printed” (most money is digital nowadays).

This inflation will one day hit the real economy, and hurt us all!
Most coffee beans come in non-degrading packages. It’s less waste than Nespresso, but it’s not 100% either.

I don’t think rent-seeking applies to Nespresso. Yes they make money from laziness, but it’s not rent-seeking in a parasitic way. You can stop buying Nespresso any day.

I agree with your overall point though. I have a Gaggia Classic. Running with relatively low maintenance for 6 years now. But when I’m on vacation, I actually appreciate a Nespresso machine in an Airbnb.
It has a really good security system built in. When activated, it “locks” the wheels by applying reverse torque in whichever direction you attempt to drag it. The key is also a small device that communicates with the Segway cryptographically (pretty impressive for the early 2000’s!).

But mostly I think it’s because it was really heavy and perhaps novel enough. Nobody ever messed with it, even though the city I was living in was pretty bad in terms of crime rates.
> It has been heavily modified, first so it cannot cause infections

Amusingly, lives would probably be saved if they had kept the base virus used for vaccination infectious. It's just the common cold, and the side effects are currently only a headache and fever, so getting the vaccination virus secondhand would be better than getting coronavirus, and you'd be protected after.
I think the solution is a dual eink and oled display. Overlay a “transparent” oled on top of an epaper screen and use the oled to display colour images and video while using the epaper for static monochrome regions.

I’m not sure that current “transparent” oled technology is transparent and thin enough though.
You think that's bad! I still haven't made the switch to Worms from Scorched Earth!
I started a business early and ran a few service businesses with some success. Cash flow was always a problem and working your ass off waiting for the big payout put a huge strain on my wife and kids.

It wasn't until both my wife and I were working full time that we started to accumulate wealth.

No commitments? Start a business early.
Some commitments? A regular paycheck and saving as much as humanly possible makes it easier to take risks later.
- Pull power inside the wall. Drill a hole on top, another one on the bottom, use one of those magnetic cable pullers. Wires for 5v requires two tiny holes in drywall that's easy to patch later. There's also pretty kits made for TVs, but those require bigger holes (for HDMI, power, etc).

- Pull power from the room behind the wall. Maybe it's more out of view here.

- Place it next to a door, remove part of the frame, run wires inside the door frame.

- Cable channel exists in many different shapes and sizes, not only the boring box ones.

- Go the opposite route, why hide your cable? Make it stand out. Like those wall lamps with a brightly coloured / patterned cable hanging in loops down the wall. Turn it into wall art.

You can find some pretty wall mounted tablets in the homeautomation and homeassistant reddits :)
The geopolitics of 5G – America’s war on Huawei nears its endgame
GPT-3 and Verification
I've been reading Peregrinacao by Fernao Mendes Pinto (in English, as it was written in the 1500s); a weird sort of Portuguese Marco Polo. As my language skills improve, Aquilino Ribeiro is on my list.
This is the United STATES, a democratic republic - not to be confused with a popular democracy outright. We recognize that in national issues, a few blocks in a major city should not be able to out-vote (and thus overrule) entire states having very different needs/interests. Issues which are appropriate for popular vote should be decided within suitably local jurisdictions. Without this balancing of "tyranny of the majority" vs "tyranny of the minority", low-population states would not have signed onto, and would not remain in, the overall federal system.

In a country so large and with so much diversity (!), no region should be able to absolutely dominate another simply by having a larger population.
scott_s wrote the canonical comment about that in 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Alex and Ani's Billion-Dollar Jewelry Empire Fell Apart
Yes, indeed. What I mean is, with Chebyshov polynomials, you will avoid Runge effect but it's not an issue for a small order polynomial. And to win against the hardware implementation, you have to keep your polynomial small.

I measured this for a contemporary Intel processor some maybe ten years ago and found out that 6th degree (actually, its 3 for x^2 since you can throw away all the even coefficients) makes sense performance-wise, yes the error is greater but that's the point of the trade-off. But even 8 or 10 is already doubtful.

Of course, there are architectures other than Intel and it might make sense to use higher order polynomials for better accuracy there.
I think that would grow the number of Playstation users. Microsoft would have to add nipples to compete.
A full rationale is a nice ideal, but if you don't have time to research and compose a full rationale, silence is not always the best alternative.
'Doomscrolling' Breeds Anxiety. Here's How to Stop the Cycle
I think it's dictated from up top; I'd use them if they were common in circulation, but I'm not to go out of my way to request rolls of them from a bank.
The geek in me thinks this is a totally rad project, but..I'm not one to tell people how to use their computers, but building virtual worlds using computers burning actual worlds just strikes me wrong, I guess. I recognize that my use of computers for entertainment increases my carbon footprint dramatically, but recruiting cycles across the globe to inefficiently construct objects in Minecraft. idk
Funny, I happen to have this open in another tab.

https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-...
Have a mirror? Looks like site is already down.
Bloomberg is successful because they are a monopoly supplier of valuable information, and that's the whole story.

Their software is a shitshow, for developers and end users. Their data curation is often lacklustre. But none of that matters.
But if you're not an evolutionary extremist ... merely someone who notes that our previous IA was around when the human population was a tiny fraction of the current level, and that there is no reason to think that it had been anywhere close to our current level before the IA.

Essentially, for there to be a future IAP, there would need to be a massive near-extinction level event for humans. Obviously, there's no reason to insist that this cannot happen, but if it doesn't happen, I don't see there will ever be an IAP in the future.
I would love to see the hundreds of support groups. This is an urban myth about the long term damage.
Common colds can occasionally be serious for people who are severely immunocompromised in other ways.
The NSA/CIA have a huge hidden budget. They are known to invest in startups. Why try to break crypto when you can just pay some tax payer money to large corps to get them to convince sites to mitm themselves.
Acoustic fingerprints of soundscapes enable rapid scalable ecological monitoring
One Small Vote for Lockport, One Giant Lesson for 2020 America
The Onyx Boox line has a 13.3" display version. They mainly cater to musicians using them for sheet music but I have a friend that consumes textbook PDFs at a pace of about 3 per week that swears by his.
It feels like you're very bent on casting everything in a vain and appearance-focused light.

I'm not sure how much more clear I can make it: none of my clothing choices are based on fashion nor on appearance, other than the basic requirement of actually being dressed and not wearing ragged scraps.

My choices are based on practicality. If someone wants to turn that into fashion, they can go right ahead, it won't change my choices.
I don't. I just iterate over time and don't worry about it.
Actually, I'm not sure if they do any DNS geo-loadbalancing. I've seen it report different IPs from different locations at times, but that could be something else.

But I'm pretty sure they use DNS do other loadbalancing and DDoS mitigations.

For example, if a site is under attack, they can send it to different IP addresses to keep it away from other sites. Or if someone is directly targeting a cloudlflare IP with a DDoS, they can redirect all sites to other IPs and just blackhole that IP.
> Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone.

Marxist notions have been one of the key driving forces in the transition between late 19th Century capitalism and modem mixed economies in the developed world (though never without compromise), and haven't been even attempted to be applied anywhere outside of advanced capitalist democracies directly, only through the lens of Leninist (and later, derived from that, Stalinist and Maoist) totalitarianism, since robust capitalism with developed working class consciousness is a prequisite for the post-capitalist development in Marx’s theory, a pre-requisite abandoned and replaced with the vanguardism in Lenin’s work and it's derivatives.

> In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled.

Not sure what that has to do with Marxism, since Marxists (even in the sense of Leninists, etc.) weren't in charge most of that time, and were violently targeted by right-wing military dictatorships for substantial stretches of it.

I mean, unless you mean that Marxist notions are dangerous because holding them might get you murdered by right-wing dictatorships, which I'll grant is valid point, though not the one you seemed to be arguing for.
Ugh, I'm on it!
The term "simulation" comes to mind as a description of the emerging art and science of ultra-realistic bullshit generation.

From Baudrillard (https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism...): "Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real."
I tried the recommendation engine with some prompts that are fairly simple, but would require a deeper understanding than just a keyword search to get right (e.g. "books where magic is secretly technology"). The recommendation engine does not seem to be doing significantly better than a keyword search would. I would probably have more success with raw Google.

This is the sort of thing that dampens the hype for me a bit. I keep assuming that the demonstrations are not cherrypicking examples, but it's kind of hard to believe I'm just uniquely good at picking problem cases.
Padé approximants (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padé_approximant) can be better, but “larger class” isn’t a good criterion. The ratio of two polynomials of identical complexity will have twice the number of degrees of freedom as each of its polynomials, and will typically take twice as long to compute (and that’s ignoring the division, which is relatively expensive).

So, instead of dividing two polynomials of degree n, you could compute one of degree 2n.
José Rodrigo dos Santos in the same list as Eça de Queirós is offensive. Rodrigo dos Santos is the Portuguese-version of Dan Brown, not a literary giant.
I also have one of these and I really like the 13" screen. Recommended, though pricey.
Even so, that's massive discrepancy in efficiency if it's really just a matter of the hardware. I think we're missing something still.
URI fragments would indeed be better, but you'd be relying on the page author to provide enough granularity. I like the concept of the Chrome extension, but would like to see it standardized since I don't use Chrome.

For my website ( https://ontherecord.live/ ) I'm relying on user feedback/manual moderation, which currently works but doesn't really scale.

I think bit rot is an even bigger problem (either that or people maliciously quoting their own page/a Wikipedia article, which they can then change). I'm considering using the Wayback Machine ( https://web.archive.org/ ) to preserve a copy of the page being quoted, similar to what Wikipedia is doing, because unlike a published scientific article web pages can and do change over time.
Getting: ‘Error establishing a database connection’
In jeans they even predate the "mobile pocket" fad, they've been called "carpenter's pockets". It seems somewhat classist to dismiss the innovation simply because it looks like "working construction" and comes from such a blue collar background. (Which makes sense, why wouldn't innovations in functionality over fashion originate in blue collar spaces?)

As a 90s nerd that fell into a habit of carpenter pants when they were briefly cool, but came to respect the "mobile pocket" functionality of having a pocket further down the leg towards the knees. It's really fast/convenient to move things (especially phones) in/out of. It's continued to surprise me how slow it has been to be adapted to other pants. If it takes the "mobile pocket" rebrand, that's fine, but it's still somewhat rude to forget the blue collar roots of the idea.

(It also amuses me that while the article addresses the cargo pants criticism, doesn't seem familiar with either the "mobile pocket" or "carpenter's pocket" name.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_jeans
A Bloomberg for crypto would make a killing.
Principle #23: plan for unexpected scale :)
I think you're right. That said, I do wish that people would be a bit more precise (and focus less on generic and confusing jargon) in their language however when discussing epidemiology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number#Effe...
> What if you need to change code review systems? Do you just abandon all that information?

You choose one of: (a) migrate the data, (b) leave the old system running, (c) archive the data. Same as if you need to change version control systems, or any other important system.

> What if your code review system becomes a central point of failure for information that you need about your process/workflow?

Could you elaborate? I thought we were talking about needing to answer questions like "what were they thinking when they decided to make a specific change, at a level of detail too fine for the change description?" What would be critical to your workflow, but only available in past review discussions?

> To use a DVCS in a distributed fashion, doesn't it make more sense to store that data in the DVCS itself?

Nowhere I've worked has used the version control system in a distributed way, beyond someone being able to work while they're on their laptop without wifi.
It's still 3x as expensive as an LCD display of the same size. The LCD display has full color, too.[1] The E-Ink display offers only 7 faded colors.

[1] https://www.buydisplay.com/5-inch-lcd-screen-tft-module-800x...
+1 for Mia Couto and José Luís Peixoto. Other comment in this thread mentioned Luis Fernando Veríssimo, which I also recommend.
So no problem with Nazis using USPS but FedEx is to be condemned for not opening all your packages and refusing the ones with proscribed literature?
Although nobody implemented this yet, I'm guessing someone did patent it already ...
in fiction, Castle DunBroch from Disney's Brave.
Meal timings affect your waistline