skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meditation is ridiculously oversold as a magical solution to all of life's problems. The whole question of the relationship between meditation and the ego just strikes me as irrelevant if not made up entirely in the way that religions make up stories about the spiritual benefits that their practitioners can enjoy.

The most use I've gotten out of meditation is as a simple cure for habitual thoughts and behaviors. And I think the logic is incredibly straight forward: if you find yourself suspecting that what you're doing is not helpful and/or not deliberate, what better thing to do than to sit down and take an honest look at your thoughts and impulses? It's not rocket science and I don't think it's fundamentally a religious practice either (as some here have suggested).

Coming to the practice with an overinflated sense of what's possible will certainly lead to disappointment and maybe even depression.
The overwhelming engineering contributor to success is latency to add functionality¹. The overwhelming contributor to reducing latency to add functionality is codebase familiarity. Conditional on the codebase being my own, the overwhelming contributor to familiarity is proficiency with the tools. The overwhelming contributor to proficiency is sustained use. I have sustained use of Rails+React on Heroku.

So I use Rails+React-on-TypeScript on Heroku for a web-app. I use Scala+Spark on Databricks-on-AWS for data wrangling. I use Python for local scripting. That's because in these domains I have mastered my tooling and that's way more valuable than using the best tooling that I have not mastered. The program design choices are similarly non-decisions. Just always do the same thing.

I do experiment for fun because it is enjoyable to me, and that's the mechanism to add more things to the proficiency list. For instance, I like Rust (and use forked Rust utility programs for personal use) but when I write my next command-line tool I use Python or Go. When I become proficient in Rust, it may become a possibility that I use it.

¹ Of course, the overwhelming contributor to product success is the product choices not the engineering. Few products succeed or fail on the engineering. In each case, you only want to innovate on the differentiator. It's like a variant of the "optimize the bottleneck alone".
Recruiters impacting product development seems so obvious of a link but I've never thought of it that way.

Makes me wonder what effect referral bonuses have on an org. People might be more likely to refer people who are similar to themselves, so you might end up with more of the same. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who's already in...
I think the case here is a lot easier than the case for bitcoin mining. Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much. Maybe in general it helps create an industry for designing and manufacturing ASICs. I suppose that might go into making ASICs for deep learning at some point.
> But then this is competitive pressure for Apple to charge lower fees and allow apps to handle payments themselves, at which point the app would be back in Apple's store because the customer prefers to buy it from there. Everyone benefits (except Apple).

No it isn't. The next moment Apple significantly lowers its comission, the same people will start whining about Apple "dumping the market" "to sink its competitors", and that it should be prosecuted under the same flawed anti-trust legislation. Been there, seen that: if your rates are too high you are a monopolist; if your rates are low you are dumping; and if your rates are the same as of your competitors then there's a "collusion".
> meditation is a religious practice specifically aimed at causing ego-death

Only very specific types of meditation, at their advanced levels.

The kind of meditation the vast majority of people do in the US, for example, has absolutely zero intention of achieving ego-death.

Saying meditation is specifically aimed at causing ego-death makes as much as saying running is specifically aimed at qualifying for the Olympics.
> (A) as this thread is showing there are still a lot of people on apple’s side

HN is unlikely to be an unbiased sample of the general population, along many axes.
I would also add that having more/too much capital may also be the downfall of many companies.
What do you find him wrong about?
I assumed OP meant that the answer to "what's the best X?" for any nontrivial X, is "it depends"!
How Government Is Turning into Algoracy – Tribune Magazine
half the US market but how much of gaming market? Personally I have always used macs but I have a windows desktop specific for gaming. I don't think anybody somewhat into gaming would have bought an apple machine for that purpose.
Do you then agree with the decision to prevent installation of Fortnite or any other software from which Apple wants to extract more revenue?

Because Apple has shown that they will use that mechanism to exert commercial control, not just to secure your data.
Nope. I personally run with this setting:

https://it.nmu.edu/docs/allowing-third-party-applications-in...

Amazingly it then lets me run all the open source I want that I download from the internet but am too lazy to build myself.
No, it doesn't. It just means it's users have to take extra steps. I use non-notarized software every day on a Mac.
The people defending Apple are different from the people attacking Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
My children will go to public school. Until their class has a positive case and then... We'll see.

They are 8 and 10, and honestly, digital learning and communication tools were a total flop last year when they spent 8 weeks at home.

All we can do is give then love and stability to let them know it's ok not to know the answer... Not to the homework, and not to covid either.
I wonder how long we can continue overfitting these benchmark datasets as a community of researchers? How much is ImageNet is labeled incorrectly/subotimally?
Logan's Run!
Any automatic software is a malware, according to that definition. That's weak.
Thankfully, I'll never get bored of making cheeky comments. ;-)
The Opinionated Guide to React
Wigner can’t tell, but the friend knows. If he thought he was in a superposition he would believe in many worlds.
If you are nearsighted then it's probably because your eyes are adjusting to close objects like reading and looking at a monitor. Your eyes adapt to their focal length. For example, taxi drivers often get farsighted.
Oh, I fully agree there is risk of long-term side effects and that trials are crucial. But was just curious if there had been any cases of things like that getting through trials and other safeguards.
Thank you so much for making this. I was constantly checking it to determine what was flying above our house in Minneapolis during the recent civil unrest. I took comfort in at least know what was buzzing us and why it might be doing it.
The S&P isn't risk-free! The only risk-free asset is US Treasury bonds, because we assume US Treasury can't default on payments.

The goal of a robo advisor, for most people, is not to beat the S&P, but to balance risk and reward according to the individual's time horizon and risk profile without any manual intervention.

Beating the S&P is a fun game for people who want to spend time on it, but this isn't for the general populace.

If you want to beat the S&P and you're okay with above-average risk, but also want a completely hands-off approach, I would suggest 100% PSLDX [1]. It's a hybrid active/passive mutual fund that uses buy derivatives (futures and swaps), collateralized by bonds, to boost S&P returns. The high (1.01%) fee only looks high until you look at the returns; most years, it does 20-30%. Its return in 2019 was 52%. In theory, it should do only slightly worse than the S&P in a bad year.

Another interesting futures-based fund is NTSX [2]. It's pretty new, but it's consistently beat the S&P since inception, and did very well in the March dip.

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/psldx/quote

[2] https://www.morningstar.com/etfs/arcx/ntsx/quote
I started meditating weekly with a Zen Buddhist group about 4 months before I started taking medication for depression a couple years ago.

Mindfulness is emphasized in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). The idea behind this is that depression manifests as distorted thoughts (e.g. "Everyone hates me, I should die."), and the goal is to notice these thoughts and learn to substitute them (eventually automatically) with thoughts that are more productive/positive.

From what I've seen, most meditation practices are very helpful for the "notice the thoughts" part, but, especially in non-religious settings, tend to neglect the "substitute the thoughts" part. Usually what I hear is something like "notice the thought and let it go."

So if the thought "Everyone hates me, I should die" comes up during meditation, you just notice it and let it go. That often provides some relief in the short term (you're no longer actively thinking about dying), but you've done nothing to prevent it from arising again later, and you haven't learned any coping techniques for when similar thoughts won't go away (which can be a symptom during severe episodes). If you have depression or anxiety and want to get into meditation, I would strongly suggest at the very very least researching the principals of CBT in case you find yourself in this situation. I would recommend an app called Woebot. Even better would be to try some actual CBT if you are able.

All that said, I think that for me joining a meditation group was beneficial for me because of the social aspect more so than the actual meditation. This group emphasizes community (sangha) and service pretty heavily. A lot of people get social benefits from other religious communities, but as someone who didn't grow up in a religious household, I find Buddhists super easy to get along with. They tend to be very accepting, especially to newcomers, since they are taught not to make judgements of others. It's comforting to know if I'm going through a rough patch that at least I don't have to worry about people judging me for missing meditation that week.
> On a device I own...

And that's the issue. The overwhelming body of evidence in recent years suggests Apple does not consider the devices they make to be "yours." Rather, their attitude seems to be that those devices forever belong to Apple, and Apple simply allows you to pay for the privilege of using them.
If you want support from an app for piano and especially if you already have a keyboard or digital piano with MIDI out, I would strongly recommend Simply Piano on the iPad. I'm not affiliated, just a very, very happy user with a young kid getting more out of that app than I would have imagined—I started off keeping pace, having played a few instruments but not piano before, but when your kid spends every spare minute on the damn thing it's hard to keep up, after they get the hang of it.

It's not so hot at form—it tries to teach and reinforce it but of course it can't dynamically check that you aren't screwing up—but is great at most other things. Heavy focus on playing recognizable and fun music (they license tons of stuff) to keep up interest, with arrangements adjusted down as necessary. Long, segmented "curriculum" plan with some branches, free play modes on songs you've "unlocked", sheet music available and play modes that scroll the page for you. It's really nice.
It's about balancing the market. That's why anti-trust exists. Would you want an insulin monopoly to be able to have 95% margin? Probably not. That's why it's illegal.

Too many usinesses can't live without access to iPhone users.
The risk coming from malware to end users on laptops is about 0.1% of the risk from cars, and following the message in scary red letters is pretty simple too.
If you are an awful person, it must be depressing to come to grips with that. But worth a try.
We've been injecting money into the economy in a broad-based way through PPP. It didn't turn out especially well, a lot of it went to large companies that didn't need it, and small businesses (largely restaurants) are going bankrupt in enormous numbers because it didn't help them sufficiently.

You're arguing that a New Deal-esque program is going to be problematic because it's inherently going to have issues in execution, but you're suggesting a solution that there's absolutely no reason to believe won't have issues in execution.
Is Nike so far ahead of every other shoe manufacturer? What's the margin on a pair of Nikes? How many young kids waste family money on a brand who makes the shoes for a fraction in Southeast Asia. How about Christian Louboutain?

There's also the sunk cost for many people. If you've bought tons of content in the App Store, you'd have to rebuy everything if you switched to another ecosystem. For the same reason, if you own proprietary camera lens for Camera Body A, you are not likely to dump all your photo equipment even if a Camera Body B comes out that is cheaper and better.

Path dependency. We learned this lesson once with the Wintel duopoly. Then with the Web, from about 1994 to 2007, we had broke the shackles. And now, people are happy to enslave themselves again, and vigorously defend their servitude.

Apple makes great hardware and software. They don't need this.
If "4 days across a couple dozen machines" cost millions, something is very wrong.
Try https://www.rossmanngroup.com/ he also has a YouTube channel and is very active in the right to repair movement.
No you wouldn’t. This is what an accountant does for you.
Here is one vendor who is trying to sell the technology to police forces in the US:

https://www.pss-1.com/
I get your point...
My favorite incarnation of this idea is probably Datasette.

https://github.com/simonw/datasette
> We can put all the warnings on bleach we want, someone out there is still going to drink it.

If we went with the Apple solution, this means nobody gets to use bleach.
Mac malware, come on. There's no Developer ID or notarization on iOS, it's App Store only.
As someone new to React (~6 months full time) I'm keen to start reading this book soon and see how far off I've been in terms of coming up with best practices for myself. Like anything labelled "opinionated", I may disagree with some things, but anything I can read to make my code better, I will :)
If the app review process is supposed to ban objectionable content then why is Netflix allowed? What stops Netflix from putting bestiality porn on their service (and thus onto iDevices) any more than Microsoft putting objectionable games on xCloud? Simply, because Apple knows that iPhones are commercially unviable without Netflix.

Don’t accept the bullshit Apple offers for the App Store. It has always been about the benjamins, and to over a trillion dollars of success.
Apple fans seem okay with this and also not being able to install apps outside the app store.
> "Millions of developers rely on the Unreal Engine to develop software, and hundreds of millions of consumers use that software," argues Epic.

> "Developers that intend to sell their apps for use on iOS or macOS devices will have to forgo the Unreal Engine in favor of other engines," reads the motion.

That is what I was expecting after Epic went after Apple. They had to know it would hurt them and all the devs using the engine.

Unity many times has feared not being able to build to Apple like in 2010 for the JIT/AOT item which led to more AOT and eventually C++ IL2CPP to get the requirement of native over virtual machine based engines (it was ultimately unnecessary and later Mono included AOT). [1]

Epic had to know this would be VERY risky and now they have put all their devs at risk who target iOS. Who knows that type of fallout this will have long term. It is a battle of greed and not better products and that is what sucks. I don't like the way Epic is going about this at all. Not only is Epic being used by Tencent, they are using devs and their engine to mount a greed based attack on Apple.

No one is happy fully with all the App Store rules, and likewise no one is happy with all the Epic Game Store rules, but the platform maker has immense power and Epic knew what would happen. They pull the same type of stuff like when they blocked Miguel de Icaza's Mono/C# extension to UnrealEngine. https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1294445857266372611

Yeah I mean look at what Epic/Tencent did, they baited Apple hard. This was a play all along.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/12939179293654138...

The worst is Epic/Tencent is going about this like they are doing it altruisitcally when their end goal is more power/take. They want their own app store on Apple and they want to have their own approval and their own take (Epic store is 12% as they are trying to catch Steam/Origin/others).

Thanks for thinking of the devs Tencent/Epic /s

The biggest bummer is I really look up to Tim Sweeney and respect all he has done for gaming. I hate that he ok'd this. Epic has 3 seats on the board and Tencent has 2, with 2 "observers" which are probably Tencent loyal. So at some point along the line Sweeney had to ok this... Looks like the Tencent money leverage got to him. He knew this would cause problems for devs that chose HIS engine. Why Tim Why. The battle of the Tims but ultimately greed that I am sure will lead to regulation that makes it worse for devs long term.

[1] https://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/07/02/unity-and-ios-4-0-updat...
Is it truly a surprise why I keep being downvoted for pointing out abuses of power by Hacker News's favorite megacorp?
There is precedent; the rate was actually much higher in previous mobile app stores (e.g. Symbian and ring tone stores).

Additionally, there is related precedent in areas like publishing (ebook stores usually charge 30% or more commission).

I don't think 30% is outlandish, though I do think it would be nice if Apple reduced that cut, especially if they wanted to consider some form of graduated rate.
> but it's nothing to do with what we're discussing here

Well, except we're talking about how these measures are generally reserved for malware. Thence my (pseudo) logic chain.
No one in California is prepared for anything remotely close to actual weather, with the exception of people who live in the mountains. Thus any deviation from the extremely limited norm seems shocking.

That said, I grew up in southern ontario where discussing the weather is pretty much a widespread hobby, so it's actually kind of nice to have weather to discuss.
Even Steve Jobs knew you needed "trucks" of computing. I'm generally fine with my phone being locked down, because I use it for straightforward tasks. I (and the many other developers who use Macs) need my laptop to be a "truck". If it stopped being that, I'd stop being a customer. But we're not at that point yet and I think Apple would be really dumb to go there and alienate a huge market.
Unlike e.g. SQL (S-Q-L vs "Sequel"), I have only ever heard it referred to as a CLI. Would be confused at anything else.
Yeah, ultimately the users of your product define how it’s built and what features it needs. And if your goal is to build something profitable, you’re gonna go after users that are willing to pay over those that aren’t.

It’s hard to say what impact referral bonuses have. I know that most of my network does not appreciate being solicited for new opportunities, but I don’t know how often referral bonuses are actually paid out.
Depends, do UK companies have a long history of stealing IP from outside companies and profiting off that IP with no repercussions from the UK gov?
GPT training performance on the CPU is funny. The vocab size and context window size have a massive effect on both speed and accuracy.
A cursory google search indicated that mobile gaming represents about 45% of the total games industry [1]. That's quite a lot, I'd say that the potential risk here is well into "unacceptable" territory.

[1] https://kommandotech.com/statistics/mobile-gaming-statistics....
You can't just replace a system where a very few people with real needs receive a large amount of targetted support with one where the same amount of money is distributed evenly throughout the entire population. Handing out free money is always popular; leaving people to suffer or die from lack of necessary medical treatment costing far more than the UBI payments, not so much. The introduction of a UBI would not automatically eliminate the need-based welfare system and its administrative overhead. Even if it did, in the end there would still need to be a system to keep track of who is qualified to receive UBI payments (even if it's just based on citizenship / residency), who has or has not been paid, where the payments are to be deposited, etc. Stopping one person's UBI in response to a court judgement would be trivial.
I'm curious about how you became an apprentice then decided it wasn't for you? These are not easy to get into I've heard. What made you consider it and what made you leave?
GatsbyJS toxic work environment: gatsbyjs
Great questions!

> How does bookmarking work/How do I keep track of how far I've read while replaying from Batch?

We do not have any bookmarking functionality built (yet) as we currently expect folks to just tweak their search query. Each one of the events has a new id attached to it that you can query and reference during search.

> Will you also index by date?

We do! Every event has a microsecond timestamp attached to it.

> It can take a long time to replay a lot of data; do you have any numbers on the read rates you support per topic?

We've done some initial replay throughput tests and have been able to reach ~10k/s outbound via HTTP - of course, this is all _highly_ dependent on where you're located. We expect that for folks who need super high throughput, we'll probably need to be closer to them - we fully expect to have to peer with some of our customers and optimize for throughput by doing gRPC and ... batching :)

So far, we've done most of our testing on inbound and we are currently able to sustain ~50k/s (with ~5KB event size). Our inbound is able to scale horizontally and so can go waaaaay beyond 50k/s if needed.

We have a ton of service instrumentation so we've got good visibility around throughput (and thus should know well in advance as to when we're starting to hit limits).
I believe they’ll likely keep this the case, not out of generosity, but because the most valuable thing Mac gets them is developers writing apps for iOS. This will only become more true in time unless there’s a sudden reversal of the trend towards phones and tablets over laptops. They may not care about power users in general, but allowing developers to run their own code to target their platforms is crucial, and there’s no mint to be made on macOS by fully locking it down due to the reduced marketshare.

I would not be shocked however if at some point they switched to developers having to buy special Macs to have this capability, and normal Macs would cease to be able to turn off secure boot and SIP and would require code signing/store distribution universally.
Agreed. Very well put, thank you.
Your proposed schedule will also need time for burnout and therapy. Maybe not a good plan...

You're going to have to let something slide. Choose one priority and then fit what you can into the time that's left, and accept that it doesn't all fit. I hope you choose your child as your priority, but you'll find your own way. Good luck.
Thanks. So an event that goes in would be something like, “user logged in,” and services that care about that data would be...? Sorry still having some trouble understanding it.