skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Replying in parallel, because I have further thoughts to share. Ever since this comment thread started I've been thinking a lot about those times of hyperproductivity I've described, and I've identified couple things that were true in both cases, and thus are hypotheses worth checking out:

- In both cases I had a hard deadline and a well-defined set of goals, but there was a big gap between "minimum acceptable outcome" and "best possible outcome", with rewards scaling with the outcome. Something back then made me set my sights on the high end of that spectrum.

- I wasn't really blocking other people - if I didn't meet my deadline, I'd suffer some limited (and mostly non-financial) loss, but nobody else's work would be destroyed by this. I.e. in one case my work was irrelevant to anyone but myself, and in the other it was an optional (though strongly desired) dependency.

- I had people to impress. In one case personally, in the other I wanted to make our group look impressive in the local community.

- Both cases have had a significant "like hell I/we can't do it, just hold my beer and watch this" factor. I.e. the deadline was tight, and relevant people didn't believe it could be done in the time remaining.

These factors are a bit harder to reproduce. Most of situations I encounter these days don't have truly hard deadlines ("there's a release next week" is almost never a hard deadline in practice), and yet at the same time involve potential losses to other people (if the release actually happens and I don't deliver, I might derail it). There's little space to go above-and-beyond, in a way that doesn't feel like setting yourself fake goals for the purpose of self-gamification.

I'll be thinking about ways to test these hypotheses and, if any of them turns out to be a significant factor, to engineer my life to make use of it.
I fear Germany will never build another nuclear power plant again. The anti-nuclear propaganda has become a religion now, any argument about safety is ignored mumbling the mantra "but they said Chernobyl/Fukushima was safe", any argument about economy is ignored with "but renewables cost nothing". Since no rational argument can be won, and since no nuclear counter-religion is on the horizon, nuclear will not happen here, at least not in this century.
Did you just slippery-slope all the way to entropy? I agree with you and I'm "on your side" in the inane political sense. Just acknowledging the drawbacks.
Probably.

I know dynamic scoping is considered dirty but I'm not convinced that it doesn't have its place. I think the problem in the past is that dynamic scoping often replaced syntactic scoping. But it can be a nice replacement for when you are deciding between a global or a context parameter to every function.
Somewhat: there was definitely a walled-garden with an entire AOL ecosystem, but that wall also had a door you could walk through out into the wild west web of the times.
Not an american here, so it's more of a general comment.

I'm all for investing in and investigating nuclear power -- after all, the humanity needed several decades to make electricity itself safe at all; if we manage to make nuclear safer and indeed manageable, that's a fine thing, scientifically speaking. It's good to have options.

However, we should be keeping an eye on the costs. Nuclear energy is cheap, but disposing of its waste is anything but. In Europe, energy companies have essentially socialised waste disposal so that they can advertise for "cheap" nuclear energy. If the disposal costs had been placed on them, nuclear would be the most expensive energy source by far.

We are probably better off future-wise looking elsewhere for a clean and cheap energy source. Fossil and nuclear are neither.
I am not a mathematician. But there is also a JSON representation [0] besides XML. As an exchange format between pieces of software, isn't it usable?

[0] https://www.openmath.org/standard/om20-2019-07-01/omstd20.ht...
- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

Got gifted a 286, and wanted to know how it worked. A retired friend of my father gave me the K&R book and I devoured it. I focused on input/output and calculations, (much) later moving to MUDs, and (much later) moving it to the web, too.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

Web-dev/sysadmin/jack-of-all-techs/tech-lead. It's everything I dream of, and have nightmares about. It's great! I get to both use known/proven/old things to build something new & useful; learn new things to build something with; and learn new things to then know when to not use them.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

~20y ago, a newly founded start-up needed an apprentice who knew C/asm and was interested in home automation and... there I was! I can't remember details about the interview itself, but it was mostly about attitude and very little coding, as I think I already worked with them on a separate project (the C "main" routine for the C/CGI behind a search engine they had created a library for) and they knew I had the chops they wanted.

- What were you doing before this?

High school then a couple years at uni/informatics doing not much. Didn't finish.

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Make it work, make it pretty/proper/right, make it fast enough. Buildings are created from strong foundations; learn your/the basics really well. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. YAGNI. Printf-based debugging is totally fine. Communication is a big deal, and I suck at it. Communicate, communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more.
Sure, here you go.

a — height of a white tile

b — width of a white tile

a x b — S₁, area of a white tile (this is what we are trying to "find")

(a - b)² — S₀, area of a black square

(a + b)² — S, area of a whole block (4 white tiles, 1 black tile)

Now, looking at the image it is obvious, that (S - S₀) = 4S₁.
It has more comments than upvotes. Usually that's an indication that a flamewar is going on, so submissions like that are downweighted automatically.

In any case, it's back now. Probably the mods got a notification that the flamewar detector was triggered and went to check.

The next time you have a question about HN's mysterious workings, you should email hn@ycombinator.com (contact link in footer). You're more likely to get an answer that way.
Come on they got some things right, like lexical scoping and functions.
How many of those fires burned 10km^2? 100m^2? 1000km^2? That's the size of each of the lightning complexes still burning.

I'd guess that in decades none of them have or it would have been in the news and nobody would have done it again... Lot's of rural places burn garbage in the US. They just don't do it where there's a high risk of burning down the neighborhood.
A coworker has Game Pass and says he only has access to the standard edition.
>Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

It was an accident. I needed to accomplish an admin task which required modifying a SQL query someone else wrote. I just fully dove into SQL mainly for reporting purposes after that.

>What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I am a data engineer for a unicorn startup. It is really awesome! The pay is ridiculous, especially considering I live in a low cost of living area but have a standard tech SF salary. Also the talent is insane. I get to interact with some really smart folks.

> How did you break that first-job barrier?

I saw the opportunity to automate an admin problem with a SQL query. I asked a developer to pretty much be my senpai, and he gave me an SQL crash course. After that, I did SQL tutorial after SQL tutorial and eventually got promoted from call center agent to data analyst.

>What were you doing before this?

I was a call center agent and working at a car wash right before that. That was like 5 years ago :D

>Any tips for the rest of us?

Get in touch with your companies IT/engineering department if you can. Lots of software people love curiosity. Try to find someone like that where you currently work. Also, do a lot of projects and be prepared to feel really confused about how things work. I think I would not be where I am today if I didn't have some really good mentors.
Secondly, programming tutorials will have you believe that the world is just a bunch of for loops and if statements. But then you look at a real life production system and it's wayyyyy more complicated than that. Just know that the minimum amount of knowledge you need to have a software job is probably a lot lower than it would seem. Don't be discouraged when you feel like you have no idea how something works because it will happen a lot.
- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

I really liked video games. I remember some skills I learned as a very young child and teenager to do things like play Warcraft 3 online, install cracked versions of games, play on WoW private servers, host my own Minecraft server...

So then after being an aimless teenager I went to the equivalent of a community college to do "IT" at 20 years old. I learned things like windows/linux sysadmin, networking, printer management..

I never ended up finishing that degree though.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I am basically an SRE. I was doing sysadmin for my company for about 2.5 years but put my foot down and decided that having work thrown over the fence to me by devs was not a good long term career plan.

Now I've been doing software development, but it's not user facing feature work. It's been a lot of improving application monitoring/debuggability/operability (distinct from usability).

It's not really my dream job, I've sort of figured out this company by now and I'd like to get a more difficult job.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

I made personal friends with one of my teachers who basically coached me through how to get past the very difficult interview process in IT. Then I applied to internships on my university job board and got lucky eventually.

My boss later admitted to me that I wasn't hired because I had the best credentials, but mostly because I had a wide skill set and he had a gut feeling about my work ethic.

- What were you doing before this?

I worked at a moving company and played an obscene amount of Starcraft 2.

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Trying to get into IT is easier than trying to become a developer. You can start in help desk and work your way up, there are certifications for the specific technologies you will be working on (doing Cisco networking? get CCNA, doing cloud? Get the AWS solutions architect).

Once you get good at IT related skills, you'll actually pick up a lot of key software development skills without even realizing it. There is an embarrassing amount of time I have spent explaining things about git, SSH keys, layer 3 networking, HTTP, TLS... to very smart and qualified developers making triple my salary.

I did horrible end user support for my first little while. It's OK when you start out to be explaining to people how to connect to the VPN because they can't read a wiki page with screenshots, just make sure that you realize the job is a stepping stone for you to continue building skills. Once you get the job you cannot rest on your laurels.
Look at Fukushima for example.

Yes, do that. And you'll find that the meltdown and evacuations killed fewer people than did shutting down all of Japan's nuclear plants afterward (PDF: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf). In other words, nuclear power comes out ahead even if you assume there will be a Fukushima-class disaster every 10 years, which is absurdly pessimistic.
It's only a sidenote in the article but I'm kind of interested in the part where facebook are taking qanon pages down. Which ones and with what justification?
Apple's control over its app ecosystem is unsettling at times. The tactics against Epic seem heavy-handed.

But then you have to remember how Facebook scraped the contacts list on Android phones, when users installed the Android app. Ugh.

Maybe an ideal world is one where there's more than one app store for iOS, but Apple still maintains control over the developer APIs. Apple bans plenty of legit content that isn't Disney kiddie-ish enough for its tastes. Imagine if the web were like that.
Think of it as LOD generation in a game. As something observes or is near enough to observe, atomic matter is generated on demand. The Matrix; our simulation.
I only added the rejection as an illustrative anecdote.

My main point is not about rejecting an update, but about pulling you out of the store entirely or never accepting your app. Even deleting your Apple dev account as we just saw with Epic.
Maybe the internet is a different place now but if these restrictions were placed on me as a kid I never would have grown up to be who I am today.
Yes reducing mass would be a good general approach.
No, New pipe can only play background videos on picture in picture which is very annoying. Is there a way to get true background playing on newpipe?

BTW you should take a look at YouTube Vanced.
I'm reminded of XKCD's purple links comic:

https://xkcd.com/1051/
Managers who have been bitten still make this choice
Sorry but there is nothing obvious about any of it. It all boils down to the measurement problem and entanglement. While I don't like psi-epistemic interpretations either, it's not like there is anything clearly inconsistent with them, or like psi-ontic and psi-complete interpretations make more sense or are devoid of issues. They all have problems and make assumptions that are hard to swallow, and if you believe any of them and start ridiculing others you are pretty much picking sides with no good evidence. So while you might have already pledged your faith, other people with probably as much understanding of the issues or more haven't.
My parents were always very concerned about whether I was “hacking anything”
> applied to an adult.

I agree. But this was for his kids when they were kids living at his house. If he want's to maintain the no consoles rule at his house later on, meh whatever. That's his business.

Edit: Also, what makes it reasonable to enforce this while his kids were young was that he actively encouraged learning about PC's, not just consumption through a different "Magic Box".
This is different than what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft is getting data from municipalities about how tall a building is, and then generating a generic building that's the right shape and as tall as the data says it is. You can see what that looks like in the article; look closely at the Melbourne cricket ground before the community fixed it, and it's just an oval building that looks like a generic multi-story apartment building. That's their algorithmic generation when they don't have 3D data from aerial photos. (There are also fun anomalies, like the world's tallest building being as wide as a single house because someone typo'd the number of floors in the official records.)

As far as I can tell, Google isn't doing that. They only have 3D buildings where there are aerial photos that can see the walls of the building, they then use that data to construct a 3D model.
Your stance is very nice and good intended, but I don't think being attributed your work should be a problem at all in forming a good community. IMHO the ingredients are not necessarily extreme humbleness and having the most liberal licensing, instead actually good contents and just basic politeness / not thinking of oneself as a superior being, should be enough.

Probably something like the GNU Free Documentation License [1] could have been also perfectly fine. It would also prevent some shark from waiting until the text is complete and polished and then take the work of authors and contributors and sell it while passing it as their own. And that's quite a nice feature in my book (pun intended)

Whatever, I like the idea of making this the best possible resource for all things WebRTC :-)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License
There's another benefit to using a tenant_id. You can partition your tables using Postgres partitioning. That keeps the tenant's data together and keeps queries fast.

It's also amenable to distributed processing if you use something like Citus.

I'm really looking for an alternative to Citus, though. Citus itself is a bit tricky to use, and the SaaS version of it is owned by Microsoft, which means Azure-only. Also, Microsoft makes the SaaS version insanely expensive. If they had Citus-like features on Amazon Aurora I'd be there in a heartbeat.
And China has been remarkably successful in stealing intellectual property and sensitive state information under the guise of "education". Ranking officers of foreign military governments does not exonerate his actions especially when he was caught hiding and destroying data.
Personal finance podcast clued me into this at some point.

Every time a loan is used to pay for goods or services, some fraction of that goes back to “the bank” where 90% of it can be loaned out again. Best case, where all money is moved electronically and instantly, I keep seeing that 100 dollars go out and come back a little smaller over and over and over again. The tenth time I see it I can write a loan for about $30.
Those able to grok fewer simultaneous idea nodes to form new abstractions.
They're different to a human, why would it be any more difficult to understand that they're different for computers too? Trying to make things easier to understand by introducing complicated mechanisms just makes the whole thing harder to use.
Reading the linked article before making a comment, not just the title, leads to way more fruitful discussion.
Another reason is that there have been intermittent issues with garbage pickup for decades in Napoli, but I don't think there's been a full strike in the last few years... but it is of course probably still controlled by the Camorra.
Reminds me of the Bing IE toolbar 'copying' Google search results 10 years ago [1]. It turned out it wasn't that Bing was actively copying Google search results, but rather it was learning what search terms entered into the toolbar correlated with what page users went to after the query was executed.

[1]https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
> There is only one sensible thing to do with arbitrary user-input, and that is to leave it be.

I wish programmers would believe this about names and addresses! My wife has a two-word first name, and I have a two-word family name.
> It's a fucking tool, you don't see tradesmen getting all pissy about people buying DeWalt power drills.

But farmers are getting pissy about tractor DRM. If you can't control your tools, they will control you. I'm sure everyone on HN could list plenty of examples.
Ah sorry, I see what you mean now. Yeah absolutely it would be an improvement on previous releases if there's a method for community content to be added to the base game, getting the improvements out to everyone automatically.

I don't know of any custom specific building models in the game right now, not even ones by the dev team. It's all either the photogrammetry 3D that's in a few hundred cities, or the AI generic models (which are a mix of pre-made generic buildings, and generated meshes for custom shapes).
It doesn't matter much how much work you put into maintainability, someone somewhere will find a rule to declare it unmaintainable.

The rules for maintainable code are not maintainable!
I noticed the exact same thing immediately. Turned me off a bit to the article, and the mistakes appeared to continue throughout.
I’d rather see X-Plane improve graphics instead. Feels better to support a small shop rather than give my money to one behemoth of a corporation.

X-Plane dev team are chill and host live video Q&A sometimes, I think they have been porting graphics from OpenGL to Vulcan & Metal lately so there’s hope.
> Even Chernobyl is mostly safe these days unless you stay at the hotspots for too long.

You could say the exact same thing about a house fire.
I don't think what you're describing is at all likely, but let's accept the scenario for the sake of argument. The bundle ends up including the advertising JS, ok. This is the JS that inspects the environment on the page and sends the ad request. Then the ad blocker can just block the ad request.
I write all my personal code, including comments, in English and not Swedish precisely because I want non-Swedish devs to be able to perfectly understand the code even without Swedish language or cultural knowledge. Also, thinking and writing in English is much simpler than jumping between two languages.
To seriously think about creating unmaintainable masterpiece you must ensure correct environment that will meet the challenge.
Any chance you can link the first one (video chat over gameplay)? I'm working on something similar. I've tried searching and didn't turn up all that much.
More solar and wind and energy conversion and storage mechanisms can also keep our current level of society. Why can't we subsidize renewable forms of energy for trillions of dollars if our lives are truly at risk? Will these take any longer to spin up than nuclear?

And are you suggesting that solar plants really create more toxins to dispose of than nuclear? Really?
Qanon is just another religion gullible people believe something without proof because it feels good.
just be glad it's not windows XP
If your goal is human level AI, there are definitely enough qubits. Humans can subsist for quite a while on just a sandwich and a large room full of air. And that is with very inefficient usage of the available negentropy.

I guess one would have to demonstrate that the program implements an AI by running it on a computer with I/O, then move the same program over to an isolated quantum computer once it's passed that test. Maybe not completely philosophically satisfying, but should work in practice.
No, that is just as bad.
It's not about them using XML, it's about incorporating the worst aspects of XML culture by making everything overly abstract and unreadable. This problem persists in the JSON representation.

I agree with the other comment that it would have been better to look at e.g. theorem provers or maybe even at something like Mathematica.
The shift from nuclear to coal in Germany and Japan after Fukushima has caused on the order of 10,000 deaths.

The total number of deaths caused directly by the actual accident at Fukushima was what, one? We'll perhaps have a couple of hundred in the years to come, but that's two orders of magnitude fewer anti-Nuclear activists have caused.
He's someone I would really have liked to have around when I asked about the Edwards/Montgomery conversion for EdDSA all over the place. (Something I knew from the outset: when you deal with crypto, you don't do it alone. You seek advice and feedback.)

No one at the time warned me this conversion was dangerous. Yet another hint that we don't have enough cryptographic engineers.
I can assure you that's not true, a lot of good developers like Chris Belcher are actively working towards it and even receive grants. New BIPs also propose privacy improvements. Anyone can care about privacy. It's a pseudo-anonymous network, but it can be used anonymously.
Instead of a carbon tax, the government should simply treat gas similar to what many governments did before to nuclear. Forbid the construction of new ones, and let the planned life expectancy of existing plants be final.

When they did that to nuclear it worked wonders in getting people to invest. After all, people then knew that there would be vacant spots in the energy market at very predictable dates. Telling a market that in X year there will be Y amount of demand not being fulfilled, and a main competitor gone, and someone will want to fill it. The price will be based on how cheap the non-fossil fueled alternatives can be made when competing against each other.
WebBundles exist so that AMP content can look like it came from the original site instead.

(I understand that the technology is technically neutral, but AMP is the practical reason why Google is pushing WebBundles.)