skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh look another Triplebyte article that makes to the top of HN while also being completely devoid of useful information -- and, in fact, quite wrong.

> The truth is, Big-O is just the name of the notation used to describe how efficient an algorithm is.

The truth is that this is absolutely unequivocally unabashedly WRONG. Big O (there's no dash, first of all), describes the behavior of some function f as f tends to infinity (but we can actually look at Big O when f approaches arbitrary values, as well). The "O" in Big O references the function order of the limiting function --, e.g. logarithmic, quadratic, cubic, and so on. If you're going to make a hubbub about truly understanding Big O, at least get the math bits right.

> Learning about how they work without understanding the associated implications of time and space complexity misses the point.

Some fresh grad probably wouldn't realize how laughable this claim really is, but seasoned developers do. 99.9% of times you don't care (or even understand; some are quite hairy) about the (micro-)optimizations found inside standard library functions or data structures.

> It's like memorizing dates in roman history without having heard of Julius Caesar...

Yeesh, capitalize "Roman" please. What a low-quality trash-heap of an article.

> And on top of making learning easier, understanding the point of Big-O (and algorithms in general) will seriously help you avoid mistakes in interviews.

Ah yeah, here we go. Finally, we get to the only practical use case of Big O unless you're a CS PhD: getting through interviews.

Overall, this is a zero effort pseudo-marketing blog post that hasn't been researched, edited, or proof-read. It's all so Triplebyte can make the top of HN, get a bit of traffic, and keep reinforcing horrible interviewing practices that don't work. I swear, one of these days I'm going to write a book about how to actually do a good job of interviewing software engineers.
I do it every day, it's quite easy actually.
Shopify's storefront is based around a liquid renderer instance. If you look up how objects are added to the liquid context that is pretty similar to the overall pattern (or at least was back when I worked there, hi pushrax :)
Setting up a XP VM shouldn't be that hard.
> Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation.

... which is exactly what an AI would do.
Would you have to disclose a ransomware attack?
Lightroom app update wipes users' photos and presets, Adobe says not recoverable
Seems also that since Ruby is not going to be taught as part of people's normal formal education in programming, you can expect Rubyists to be on average more capable of... learning new things.

So yes, "re-train". Give everyone a book on the new language, maybe pay for some online courses from pluralsight or wherever, cancel meetings for a week. You can learn a lot faster than in a school environment when you've got paid 8 hour days to put into a single subject + coworkers to chat with.

Besides, it's not like they don't get to avoid learning new things anyway, even if you restrict it to the Ruby ecosystem. In the JS world (which I'm sure they all know too, as one tends to when working on web sites even if you're mostly back-end) as new revisions of the language come out people have to keep up with the syntax and changing idioms.

"For some reason, programmers love to learn new stuff, as long as it's
not syntax."
-- Steve Yegge
Interesting, thanks for the synopsis. :) Sounds worth looking into.
Sure, but that's not really the point. It's more running more code == probably bad for speed. There's obviously a lot of detail there, like time/space tradeoffs, large constants, etc.
But not allowing those people to work with uber would just make them... even more dependant on the state? Either:

1) They are driving because it's the best opportunity available for them, and losing that possibility would force them to work less desirable/paying jobs, have less disposable income if uber is just a side gig for them or just end up unemployed. Which would lead to them contributing even less to their healthcare/education/etc costs.

Or

2) You are assuming that they are driving even if they can get 40h jobs with good benefits but just choose... not to? Or that if uber inevitably ends up closing their California operations, they will magically find those cushier jobs & those who drive to add to their income will just find an extremely flexible side gig that can net them hundreds of dollars a month?

I don't understand how unemployment is a more desirable outcome. Because uber will absolutely not pay for each of their driver's benefits. And that's even if they were able to afford it (they absolutely can't).
Dude, you are generating random numbers inside the loop. That is going to dominate runtime.
I wrote a Lisp reader for C a long time ago: https://github.com/schani/lispreader

An interesting problem that came up was freeing deeply nested conses without overflowing the stack. I got a bug report about that from a user. They must have generated the structure in memory, because if they were reading it in, the reader would probably also have overflown the stack. In any case, the simple solution was to rotate the structure to be freed so that it can be freed without stack overflow or using an additional queue or stack:

https://github.com/schani/lispreader/blob/master/lispreader....
Business Book of the Year Award 2020
It's not writing that's well understood. There's no parallel texts like the Rosetta Stone. Also, Meroitic isn't closely related to any other language we have knowledge of. As a result, we can read a few names and little else.
I'm probably just misunderstanding the physics involved, but wouldn't moving the container only impart movement on the fluid inside in proportion to the viscosity of the liquid? And once the fluid is moving wouldn't stopping it require movement in the opposite direction or waiting for friction to reduce the inertia of the fluid?

I'm thinking of the behavior of the semicircular canals of the ear, and how the inertia of the endolymph can cause dizziness after spinning for a while.

Maybe the critical part I'm missing is that the organism is actually sinking in the fluid around it and the effect of fluid current if present is minimal compared to the effect of gravity.

As an aside, the homepage for this project is quite nicely illustrated.
Exceptional detection is not enough against Kessler syndrome. Shielding is a hope, but I wouldn't bank on it.
The state defined by its monopoly on violence. Period.
Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's amusingly bad. AI in a nutshell, I guess. It picks up on and includes context remarkably well, but the way it's used can be pretty random:

---

You are batman, a rogue living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a long steel dagger and a length of rope. You walk down the city street looking for somewhere to steal from. You look around and see a store that you think you could break into. You walk over to it and you see that the door is unlocked. You walk in and find a small collection of items worth taking.

> You check out the items.

You pick up the coins and put them in your pocket. You pick up the dagger and put it into your other pocket. You pick up the rope and look at it.

> You check what kind of rope it is.

You look at the strands of the rope. They are all different colours and textures.
Then you notice something written on the side of the packet in small print.

> You read the packet.

The packet says, "Warning: This rope could kill you."
You drop the rope.

> You kill the rope before it kills you.

You pick up the rope and drop it again so that you don't get killed. You try your luck again.
You check out the dagger.

---

Take that, you rope. Definitely won't be killing me today!
> If we are parsing S-expressions... why not embed Scheme already?

This sort of nonsense is a good example of how some projects die due to absurd feature creep that no one at all can possibly justify.
Who in their right mind would ever want to embed a full blown scripting language if your usecase is... Open a file and input data?

If you want to input data following a document format, you parse the document format. That's it.
Sounds like a great idea. You can have a big iron backend for all your k8s.

I wonder if the math works out to buy or lease one and rent out cloud compute instances.
I don't know who's advising you on SEO, but you will not ever outrank STSCI, NASA, ESA, AWS Open Data's HSTS archive, The Planetary Society, the National Academy of Sciences, or the ESO on "hubble data" as long as Hubble is still what people think of when they hear Hubble. The telescope and related sites/agencies/organizations have a 22 year head start building a relevant link profile in Google. And if you did, Google would get suspicious.

Hubble is fine as a name if you pick the right keywords to target in your marketing, but "Hubble data" is never going to show a link to something that isn't at least tangentially related to the telescope.
This would be incredibly cool as well as a tremendous time saver because going through port or to a dock is at this speed due to wake.
I don't understand the explosion of comments here either. I was just saying for myself, it's a trivial construct and very commonly encountered.
these words do not sound even remotely similar.

source: I'm Israeli, fluent in Hebrew.
Same with HR
A humane dynamic medium whose full power is accessible to all people
> Why? Is that just an arbitrary principle? Why should "hardware" be something we have absolute control over, but "software" is not?

I don't disagree with the general sentiment but

1) hardware is your property, you buy it and you should be able to use it the way you want. Also it's harder to replace it, you can easily change the gas station, it's harder to change a car.

2) the problem with Apple (but also Google Play store in many ways) is that you buy hardware capable of doing something that the software doesn't permit. Not because it's not capable of doing it, but because the manufacturer don't want you to use it that way.

But in the general you're right, I'm a big advocate of free software, and I've been since the middle 90s, because I think you should have total control over it. Including changing the parts that don't fit your needs.

I'm also in favour of using cheats if you want to, but in a tournament things have to be fair and that's where I think you shouldn't use them, in the same way I think doping at the Olympic games should not be allowed.
Microsoft Issues Emergency Security Updates for Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2
Great, next time I take a consulting gig I'll be sure to turn down the jira tickets I don't want to do.
This isn't how their S-1 reads at all... they never say they misclassified drivers. The drivers were truly independent contractors under the law at the time they filed and they note that if they were converted to employees this would cause a GREAT increase in costs...

You took a potentially objective point and added a ton of spin to it :/
She reported this issue on April 3rd. Google marked it as a duplicate on April 21st, meaning someone else had already reported it.

After it was not fixed, she publicly disclosed the issue and within 7 hours it was patched.

What broke in the process at Google? This issue allowed GSuite users to impersonate each other to send email. That is very serious.
Instead of accusing me of acting in bad faith, how about you do some research instead of mudslinging on the internet. I have provided evidence. You have provided none.

To help point you in the right direction, why are the United Auto Workers acting in California when there are no unionized auto workers in California? These unions are always seeking to increase there member base because the more members they have the more powerful they are as an entity.
> Consistent axiomatic systems require a Gödel sentence that is unprovable in the system; it requires a logical tautology or else your system will contain an infinite regress.

I don't see the connection between these two statements.
Yes, in a consistent system with a finite description, a statement in that system which can be interpreted as "the system [description of the system] cannot prove [this statement]" cannot be proven (also, where "can be interpreted as" is taken to mean the sensible thing that it should mean) (though, sufficiently weak systems can have languages incapable of expressing such a statement) .

But the second part of that sentence, after the semicolon, appears to be talking about something else? It seems like it is describing the Münchhausen trilemma , except applied to mathematical proofs, and giving an argument that a system needs axioms (and/or rules of inference).
While a system of proof does need axioms and rules of inference in order to conclude anything, this is not because of the incompleteness theorem.

The two do not seem particularly connected to me. So, I don't see why you connected the two statements with a semicolon.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by the second statement in the sentence?

Also, when you say "logical tautology", are you talking about purely logical tautologies, or are you talking about axioms? The way you are using it makes it seem like you are talking about axioms, which I wouldn't call logical tautologies. But maybe you do mean what I would mean if I was to refer to "logical tautologies"? In that case, uh, I don't think logical tautologies are all that much of a foundation?
A linter that shells out to other linters and combines the result at the end. Example: https://analysis-tools.dev/tool/go-meta-linter
Should kids have a choice if they want to engage in child labor? Should people be able to sell their organs or children for money? Opt into slavery?

The reason why we have legislation that creates regulation is because there's a body of people trying to look out for the larger common good, particularly when existing labor laws are being skirted around. If there wasn't a problem of exploitation of this entire business model (not just Lyft, but also Postmates, Instacart, task rabbit, etc), then CA wouldn't be intervening.

If NYTimes and all other news publishers had people working full time for only them, but only classified them as contractors (so much flexibility! except when you need to make a full time living), then yes I would have a problem with it. In fact, I believe that would be breaking the law.
Now it’s cultivate nukes and the legions won’t bother you.
> There's nothing stopping Uber and Lyft from allowing people to work their own hours and also giving them benefits if they meet hourly qualifications.

There is, if the driver drives in bad hours making their income not come up to minimum wage uber would be forced to pay the driver anyway. In order to avoid this uber would be forced to limit when and where people can drive.

Being an employee means that the company has to ensure that the employees time is well spent so that it is worth the minimum wage and benefits at least. Being a contractor means that the contractor himself is responsible for what he is doing is profitable enough for him to live on. So changing them to employees means that now uber has to ensure every driver only drives when it is profitable for uber.

So everyone who wants to handle this responsibility themselves don't want to be an employee.
The funny thing is that he's replying to me, one of the people who has stopped using California contractors except among trusted relationships (which is non-Upwork).

I don't know what your experience is with contractors (I use Upwork - which is an awesome platform - extensively) but that's not it. The savings come from the fact that you don't need 100% of their time, you don't need to recruit, and you can slide easily along the performance vs. price on the scale.

One is when you want an expert: for instance, we don't retain in-house counsel. We don't need it 100% of the time, but for the short periods we need it, we need the 99th percentile guy. And we can't afford the 99th percentile guy 100% of the time.

And then it's when you want drudge work but it's spiky: like you need things labelled or whatever. Upwork is like AWS for people and it's really, really good for all the reasons AWS is good.

If I suddenly have to work out payroll and benefits and all that shit, that's instantly non-viable. It's all right, the world is a big place, and things I can contract out I can just as well contract out outside of California and eventually outside the US. 90% of the time I'm doing Anglophone-adjacent nations anyway. Americans are too expensive for this work and they're equivalent performance anyway.

And for the stuff like law? Well, there I'll go with the 99th percentile guy. I know he's powerful enough to get his carve-out (as he has).
Also a frequent flier. It sucked before but the solution was 100% designed to benefit cab drivers. Moreover, it absolutely fucked up the entrance to the airport which went from long, but doable, to dozens of people missing their flights per-day bad.

I live in Playa Vista and had a 1.5 hour trip to LAX in November. I was this close to driving through there at 3am and stealing every one of their traffic cones.
They talk about reducing memory allocations. My guess is the rest of the app is very large and they’re benefiting from not sharing memory and GC with that.

Of course, everything you said is true for a small-to-medium sized Rails application.

They likely could have explored a separate Rails app to meet this goal, but then they have to maintain the dependency tree and security risks twice. And if the Rails core refactors away any optimizations they make, they have to maintain and integrate with those.

There’s definitely some wiggle room and a judgement call here but their custom implementation has merit.
In fact, with the way that modern CPUs work, big O can be very misleading, especially with small to moderate amounts of data. Performance nowadays is all about memory locality, avoiding pointers, eliminating the need for branches, etc.

For example, with Scala simple Arrays outperform most other collections, including Vectors and Lists, even when the big O is bad.

Array languages are especially powerful, even though algorithms implemented in them often do a lot of extra work. If you can keep all of your data in L1, it doesn't much matter what big O you have (usually) and the most naive data structures and algorithms will usually outperform fancy pointer chasing stuff in L3 or RAM.
They wouldn't brick your device as the native apps would always be available.

In my mind, I'm toying over how committed Apple is to the customer experience. Apple always talks about the user experience first and if they honestly believe that a free and open store is a bad experience (just for the sake of discussion accept this point), would they consider ending the app store (say for all new devices) because they'd rather give a "great" experience rather than being forced to give one they believe is substandard. Essentially protect their brand.

I don't see Google ever doing something like that. But Apple... I dunno.
I've poured more hours than I'll admit into AIDungeon at this point. The Dragon model is ridiculously good. I think everybody should try it, even if they're not into text adventures. In fact, it's quite a poor "text adventure". But it's a really fun story telling tool. The hype is worth it in that regard.

Having poured that much time into GPT-3 as a storyteller I can relay its weaknesses.

The obvious limitation is the limited context (1024 tokens last the dev tweeted). It's really good at playing out isolated "scenes". It constantly surprises me with the creative things it comes up with. But yeah, outside of a scene, it totally loses focus on the bigger picture. We see the same problems with OpenAI's musicbox app, which struggled to be coherent across even a short song. That makes it a poor replacement for a true Dungeon Master, but a really useful tool for writing scenes.

There are less publicized limitations. It sometimes gets the subject of sentences confused. When it does, it really wants to stick with that confusion regardless of how many times you have it retry.

It often gets confused by who's speaking. Even when I go back and edit she/he said into its responses. AI Dungeon has a mode to turn off quotes presumably for this reason.

It seems to have the same failings that image GANs do. Image GANs have "blind spots", types of images that they won't ever generate because they were too hard for it to learn. GPT-3 also has blind spots, certain ideas that it just doesn't understand. It won't generate content based on those ideas, and if it sees those ideas in its context it starts going off the rails. If you're lucky it'll just ignore the idea and generate what I call U-turn responses. That's where it does a 180 degree turn right out of the scene by saying something like "Suddenly there's a knock at the door!" and changing the scene. But half the time it just starts going into a loop and repeating itself. It's not as bad as GPT-2 where the repetition was like "like like like like like like". But it will repeat the same sentences or ideas over and over again. I guess because it doesn't understand the scene anymore it feels like repetition is the safest option.

I haven't found any common trope to the ideas/scenes it has trouble with. Maybe it's just stuff it never got exposed to in its training set. I was looking over the GPT-3 paper this week and while the dataset is massive, it's by no means expansive yet. A human story teller is likely to have similar blind spots in terms of ideas we're familiar with, I think we're just far better one-shot learners.

All this to say, AI Dungeon (and thus GPT-3) is amazing, in a limited context. If you let it drive the story and give a certain leeway to do crazy stuff, the adventures it will send you on are several orders of magnitude more interesting than I ever thought an AI was capable of in this decade.
No, the state has a monopoly on initiating violence. All citizens have the right to violence if it’s in self defense.

Some states will even let you carry firearms around in case you need to apply violence in self defense.
... no but they can be ONLINE on both apps as a driver at the same time (according to this online time would count as time spent working)
California has a similar restriction on real property ownership public records. Private records can still be obtained.
The point of Uber's alleged model is that Uber is not employing the driver, but rather that it is simply matching up drivers to passengers as a marketplace.

If that's the case, then Uber has no right to avoid working with contractors simply because they continually refuse work. That indicates a non-independent agency arrangement between Uber and the driver (aka "employee") and that's what they're claiming they don't have.
I think you totally misread the comment.

The process of value discovery involves all the business, ops, marketing, etc people you're talking about (they would be hired with capital or equity). No one is saying they can do it on their own.
they're talking about web apps and mostly javascript.
Far be it from me to understate the importance of software, but I think that the notion of “always” having food products is (a) not true for most people in most places throughout most of history and (b) not a compelling counterargument. Food is not like oxygen, the abundance of which is all but guaranteed.
Why is the Gates Foundation a foreign "charity"? What does that mean / what do the quotes imply?

I didn't downvote, but I'm not really following what you're saying.
You're being needlessly pedantic. A cons cell is basically a node of a binary tree. It has fancy names for the left and right child node because of its relation with lisp, but it's nonetheless a tree node.