skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. This article is one of the most compelling I've read in a while. There's even a bit in there about models and reality with respect to (authoritarian) governance and size, and why simplistic schemata suffer from large errors in larger states:

"Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases."

and on first-principles:

"Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism."

In that sense, Singapore is like a startup at a country-level.
One in ten medical treatments that have had updated reviews recently are currently lacking high-quality evidence.

I think it would be worrying if every medical review had high-quality evidence. Just because it's in the Cochrane database doesn't (to my understanding) mean that it is a frequently used treatment.
This. As a people manager I want to know if someone is struggling as long as they are comfortable sharing. I want to make sure we can make reasonable accommodations and provide support so the person can deal with the issues and come back with a healthy mindset when the problems have been dealt with. We are in unprecedented times and empathy goes a long way.
Compiling Chromium from scratch is clearly not a reasonable thing to suggest that most people do.
'No! I don't remember that nobody is better than anyone else' ? um P-:
Ultimately the rulers of USA are decided by the people. You might have a lot of trickery and corruption behind the scenes, but every politician still needs to get votes from actual workers so they can't be too alienated. This isn't optimal, but it works well in theory and is fairly robust since if the system gets too corrupt people will vote in an unsanctioned candidate.
When people are expected to learn new things outside their working time, a 4-days week with 1 day of learning at home would allow them to have a 2-day weekend.
The problem AISI lies with the US court system. If you have evidence of prior use, readily available in the public domain then the party suing for infringement is clearly acting unlawfully (or is negligent having not done due diligence). The judge should make a full award of costs and a high award of damages against the plaintiff for persuing a clearly frivolous lawsuit .. AIUI instead the plaintiff only pays their own costs, the defendant gets lumbered with their costs(?), and the judge sends the plaintiff off to try again.

Examiners at the USPTO, and other offices, are there as a filter to the courts. They just stop the courts being overwhelmed with useless, anticipated, nonsense.

There are something like 300M patent documents available in databases, and patents are anticipated by any public disclosure. So you're asking that patent examiners check against every extant publication in the World, on penalty of losing their job?

The examiner is like a programmer-tester, they'll catch a lot of errors, but if you scrap test/review programmers everytime a piece of software with a bug gets to a customer your costs of production will be higher than anyone would pay and your output will be near zero.

You need a pragmatic approach that balances an efficient USPTO with an active and effective court system.

These views are entirely my own and do not relate to my employer.
Interesting - it'd be great to have some more discussion about the maturity of the lib (or what needs to be composed to achieve "bpmn levels", e.g. scheduling)
So I read this list and at the end I was like well this is a bit bias to SW, then I looked at the source. There are trade offs on both sides. There are some advantages to the HW side, mostly consistent performance depending on the workload and the clients view of the storage. It's still and interesting space that is ripe for innovation despise all the current players. It's likely where I will go with my next startup.
Nope. I'm not claiming China hasn't been flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, of late [which at least could be claimed is its own back yard]. But the graphic speaks for itself. The USA has an unrivalled history of wars, military aggressions and destabilising of governments all over the globe since the end of the Korean war.

But you [and the rest of the western world] still seem to unquestioningly believe that you're the 'Good Guys' [0]. I mean, having a fondness for the land of your birth is all well and good, but it never fails to amaze me how many Americans just have this complete mental block when it comes to the actions of their own country.

If any other country had carried out a tenth of the actions that the USA has done, throughout recent history, it would be a pariah nation. But the US gets away with it, time after time, after time.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvpvlT9pJU
"Your workload" being arbitrary on the employees side is balanced out by "your wages" and their continuation being arbitrary on the employers side.

Whether that rubs up against some idealized mythological puritan work ethic doesn't change the fact of the matter.
This library reminds me of fast.ai itself. It’s cool how you can do so many things with a few lines of code, and I was impressed the first couple times I used it. Over time, I started to run into problems when I wanted to do something beyond the initial demo. Many parameters are undocumented, functions do something automatically that’s often nice but there’s no clear way to undo it, and side effects are scattered about. I would prefer code that was slightly longer, but simpler and more pythonic.
No the anarchist solution is to remove the need for that pollution at all. Why frack when wind power works? Sure you don't get as much power but when the whole world isn't spending 1/5 of their day driving from home to office to modify spreadsheets, you'll find some power savings.
I’ll take this one. Can someone provide some background as to exactly what is being discussed here?
> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion.

This can sound reasonable when you think of it in terms of, "most people behaving in a reasonable fashion, most of the time". But anarchists don't want to eliminate hierarchical use of force for most cases, but for all of them.

Any time I've heard anarchists try to explain how they would deal with the subset of people who are just real shitty in various ways, the responses have been either, a) in our utopia, you wouldn't have those problems, because hierarchy causes all of them, or b) increasingly convoluted and implausible-sounding ways to deal with crazy assholes without using force.
I've started to use nix (both nixos and nix installed on ubuntu) to manage those critical packages where I want both control and the option for major updates outside the OS's release cadence.
I don’t get it either. Just fresh installed 20.04 last week on a new drive and have had no trouble completely avoiding snap or even really understanding what it is. I’ve used Ubuntu for years and may have used the App Store one time.
I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. To use a network analogy...

Central Planning: [1 Figure 1a]

Functioning Capitalism: [1 Figure 1b]

Anarchy: [1 Figure 1c]

The optimal design lies somewhere between the extremes. 1a seems to be an absorbing boundary condition, so we need stabilization mechanisms to keep the system running near optimal dispersion.

In the past, we had stabilization mechanisms like antitrust law, public jury trials for torts (as opposed to closed-door arbitration), and the tax code. All of these stabilizers have been severely degraded in the neoliberal era.

[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/ufiles/i...

[2] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/new-mental-model-comput...
This 1974 PBS documentary, "The Natural History of the Water Closet: A Documentary Cantata" [1], is a good musical documentary about the toilet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJcFO_xF1fI
Maybe. Or maybe a band of like-minded people get together, arm themselves and take over the "individuals leading happy and fulfilling lives", declaring themselves monarchs and killing all those who oppose them.
I know what you are talking about in general, but most of the stuff in this library seems to either add clarity or help prevent errors. The problem of kwargs where you end up with a bunch of confusion on documentation is definitely a real thing.

Multiple dispatch is also a great thing as well. You don’t realize you need it until you try implementing something unification algorithm.

Compose is nice for reducing the mental overhead of reading nested expressions. However, I do wish they took a line from lodash and implemented flow instead (like compose but reversed so the first argument is invoked first, then the output of that is fed into the second, and so on).

Syntactic sugar is not bad if it increases signal to noise when reading code or if it prevents erroneous usage.
The patent times was established in a time were development times were considerably longer.

Even if one is entirely in favor of the patent system as it is, the expiry time should be shortened in order to match the original idea.

How many (software) industrial year correspond to 20 years in the nineteenth century? Say, 5? This would drastically improve the patent problem considerably, without having to change the substance of patents legislation.
http://www.stephenbiesty.co.uk/galleries_cross_sections_cast...

Stephen Biesty's cross sections are my reference for most engineering.
If a system doesn't work in a larger society it's not a system that can replace our current one that somewhat works on that scale.
> They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing.

Man, I get this now esp with AWS services and everyone recommending how "easy" it is to x with y service, and why it we should use to too and it will magically solve all the problems… and I'm like: "no, i'm going to use this open source software that we'll have the code for and be able to tweak to do whatever we want to do and see how it all works (oh and is free to use), and unless you are going to be willing to hack around all the edge cases yourself that with y service without me getting involved at all" and then that usually works, though I suspect once I leave, the costs of running infrastructure are going to go through to roof and no one else is going to have any clue as to why that's so (but more likely, think that its impossible to have it any other way than paying to have y)…

Moments like these are great opportunities for folks that just don't accept "the non-open proprietary" by default, but its only an opportunity because most choose to accept "the non-open proprietary" by default… we all have to pay for the choices we make… some just want to pay more to not have to think about things… tradeoffs.
I'm not saying that you should do this, necessarily, but I just installed regular Chrome from the Google .deb. That also fixed an issue with snap-Chromium not handling web app shortcuts properly.
A philosophy of software design - John Ousterhout

This has an interesting generic discussion of API design which is technology agnostic.
> I regularly volunteer at conventions. Somewhere between 90 and 95% of people follow the rules without much prompting. 5-10% of people don't...

This was my problem with the article. Yes, most people do act exactly as you say. But what if you get that entitled asshole who does actually cut in line? Because there are people out there who will do that. Now what do you do? Resort to mob justice?

There's a segment of the population that won't act that way towards others, and that segment is WHY we have those laws in place.
Well of course we're all one consciousness experiencing itself. How else would you run the simulation?
K&R is easily one of the best CS/programming books. Short, concise and to the point.

Another way to learn pointers is via assembly. Either learn assembly or just look at the disassembled code. Look under the hood and it'll become clearer.

Of course the best way is to write your own C compiler... but that may be overkill for most.
Default browser and mail reader can be set as of iOS 14. SMS app I don’t get why it is critical to be modifiable to be perfectly honest if the OS ships with a decent one. I get it on Android because the default app is shit.
The bad decision here is not "Ubuntu's snap obsession" as OP claims, but the decision by the Chromium team to piggyback on a half-baked packaging mechanism, instead of simply distributing .deb packages (like the official Chrome).

Thankfully there are plenty of fixes available. Here's one of them [1]:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta
sudo apt update
sudo apt install chromium-browser

[1] https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-...
Hmm, I'm not sure I agree. I think this is more an indictment of artificially striated political beliefs than this article. I also believe that most of where conservatives and liberals disagree are in how to deal with exactly the sort of mechanisms that anarchy seems to say are the problems in the first place, i e. Bureaucrats, the military, police, law etc.
Introduction to Computational Thinking
Not elevating the morally bereft. More like asking why one aggressive militaristic nation on the planet has a 'Get Out of Jail Free Card' when it comes to being held accountable for its actions.
I too prefer the Magic Mouse, precisely because of it’s integrations with the operating system.

I’ve also found that for perhaps those who want (most) of those integrations you can replicate it with a multi button mouse (like those sold from Logitech or Microsoft) remapping those buttons to actions using either System Settings or in more advanced cases Hammerspoon[0][1]

[0] https://www.hammerspoon.org/

[1] Sole reason I learned Lua Initially was hammerspoon
pprint is a standard library module which isn’t necessarily available everywhere. You can run python without the standard library, but the moment you add it to the default builtins it needs to become part of the language.
> And yet the majority of people at those companies vote for leftist economic policies that do that very same thing.

And you’ve decided that the people complaining about the new corporate policies are the same that vote for leftist economic policies, rather than the minority who you claim don’t support them?
Admittedly my source is the Ubuntu podcast, and it would probably take me awhile to find the exact quote, but according to the employees, they previously had one or two employees whose full time job was simply maintaining the Chromium deb package. Switching to snaps made it much easier and freed them up to do other things.

I think we should consider snaps like any other framework, be it deb, flatpak, or even something like Electron: some of them have serious downsides, but people choose them because it allows them to more easily push a single binary out to multiple platforms rather than being bogged down in maintaining a distinct build procedure for Windows/Mac/Deb-based/RPM-based/Arch/Solus/every other percent-of-a-percent Linux distro.

I don't like snaps either--I much prefer flatpaks. But I don't think it's constructive to insult Canonical employees for wanting to make their own jobs easier while they work to provide you a free product.
Racist housing policies have created some oppressively hot neighborhoods
I still don't follow. There is a constant amount of information as input into the system, but (from my understanding) the "bookkeeping" costs grow exponentially with time. This is different than the classical case where the complexity is linear with respect to time. A quick google search says that simulating quantum mechanics is NP-hard, which backs up this take. This bookkeeping is an implicit theoretical posit of a QM formalism. We can think of different ways to cash out this bookkeeping as different flavors of MWI, but we shouldn't hide this cost behind the nice formalism.

Comparing MWI to collapse interpretations, collapse is better regarding this bookkeeping as collapse represents an upper limit to the amount of quantum bookkeeping required. MWI has an exponentially growing unbounded bookkeeping cost.
I didn’t think we were talking about life experience, I thought we were talking about the nebulous term “discipline.”

And you’re switching back and forth between “young people”, “children” and now “21 year olds.” I’m trying to understand where this bias comes from, is all.
I don't know the original theory, but this explanation is brief to the point where it's nonsensical.
Embedding Data in Twitter Images
I dimly recall a pre-form web, but it could easily be they just took over a little-used Berners-Lee verb. (For instance, PUT support was atrocious for a while.)
I suspect these IP address ranges are used for Mobile data as well so probably shared between multiple users. I recognised the TMO IP because I've used TMO 4G proxies that have IP addresses in a similar range. It should disturb you that someone in Florida may have searched for 'wrong' terms and then that was used as justification to investigate another person in Florida who happened to share the same IP range as the wrong searcher.
This happens today, what do we do about it today?

Are laws preventing mass shooters? Sociopathic killers?
Monkeypatching in one application is maybe okay. You really want pprint in builtins, fine, who is it really hurting?

Monkeypatching in a library like fastcore that many other people use is really bad. All sorts of bugs and incompatibilities will happen down the road, as software becomes dependent on your monkeypatch without anyone realizing it.
P1: "Korean has an independent origin from Chinese."

P2: "I don't believe this is true" (because my background assumption is that things originate from China)

P1: "What evidence do you have that Korean isn't independent of Chinese"

P2: "None, we have no evidence from this time period."

P1: "Therefore, Korean has an independent origin from Chinese."

P2: "That is argument from ignorance."

P1: "Here are differences between Korean and Chinese."

P2: "I don't believe this is sufficient evidence to enough to revise my doubt about your hypothesis." (because of the strength of my belief in my background assumptions)

What I'm pointing out is that P2's background assumptions and strength of belief in such is inherent to his culture and life experience. This could have easily gone

P1: "Korean has an independent origin from Chinese."

P2: "Okay" (because my background assumption is that things have independent origins.)

Or in an alternate universe

P1: "Korean originates from Chinese."

P2: "Okay" (because my background assumption is that things originate from China)
Facebook (IPO 2012), Google(IPO 2004), Microsoft (IPO 1986) or Disney (IPO 1946) don't need an exit, yet they are prime examples of centralization and consolidation.
Is it? I thought it was based on Chromium now?
I was going to say this seems factually untrue, because the number of films released each year has been going up for a long time, but there are some interesting parallels on how films are distributed. Looking at https://stephenfollows.com/how-many-films-are-released-each-..., the number of films released has gone way up over time, but the number of films in wide-release has gone done.

The internet has more content then ever, but the long tail of content there is consumed at a smaller rate relative to the big 3/5/100 web properties.

The problem isn't that consumer freedom has been killed- after all, all those films and content exist and likely more accessible than ever, its that the large centralized firms have managed to largely satisfy the majority of consumer demand without it. If I have the time to see a movie (a rare occurrence sadly) and Disney has a Marvel or Star Wars movie out, I'll just go see that, even if there might be a limited showing of a comedy-western-crime genre film out that I'd enjoy even more.

Note, I am concerned about media consolidation, but its more about distribution and IP ownership at this point than consumer choice.
Eh I’m not sure politicians am have proved in recent times to be much better.

And to that point, if you don’t trust your fellow person, why would you trust them to vote, or hold office? Why would you want them to wield real power?

We need to fix this country. It starts with us. Vote. Run for office. Stop accepting mediocre government.
I recall encountering compilers that required this - there was no linker essentially. Sometimes that was all you had available.

Most of the manufacturers eventually just wrote gcc backends for their architectures, but the era of crappy proprietary compilers went on far too long in many cases.
In the face of advances in security and usability brought about under iOS/Android/MacOS and yes, Windows S, these complaints are frankly ridiculous. The days of running applications without confinement, that run with the full permissions of the user, are gone.

Ubuntu might have been able to make this a smoother process, but they lack the literal BILLIONS of dollars that has been spent achieving that on other operating systems.

If you want to be an old greybeard, use apt or build it from source.
Native Americans had no concept of land ownership. It's one of the reasons why they famously would sell land for a few beads, they had no concept of what they were actually doing.

The point is that it's possible to do. It doesn't mean we should, but it is possible.
I thought 20.04 would be the version where I went back to Ubuntu from Mint. Then along came the Snap stuff and, looks like I'll be keeping Mint for a while longer.
Um, why wouldn't it be correct to call any/all of thoes examples a variable?
Should be possible now with a less capable (microcontroller-ish) chip. Delivering power may not be feasible without custom PoE hardware on one end.
I intentionally left examples out because writing something that would be fair towards RMS is hard (and I don't want to spend the time to do it). It's also been some time since I read about this and I haven't saved the location of those sources.
I fondly remember the assembly programming tutorial which Bullfrog did in ST Format magazine back in 1991, which was the first time I had been exposed to "real" games programming techniques in assembler (the ST lacked the custom graphics hardware the Amiga had and doing something as simple as drawing sprites efficiently onto the screen was pretty tough).

Bullfrog made some great games. My favourites were Powermonger and Dungeon Keeper. The author of article seems pretty critical of the fact that their games were procedurally generated and became rote too quickly but I personally preferred those sorts of games. Too many games nowadays are highly scripted with a story that goes exactly the way that the designer wants it to. I'm more of a fan of a game world with a few simple rules, where the gameplay is an emergent property of those rules.