skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hell, ask a few people when the Western Roman Empire ended. Good luck with that. There are folks who will tell you it never did end. If you're that far in denial, how could you ever reason from your current historical position to the long run?

AFAIK, the argument over when the western empire fell is not so much about the facts, so much as the meaning of the word "fall". it's inherently arbitrary to point to the "end" of a civilization with routine violent regime changes, varying degrees of centralized control, continuous contraction/expansion of borders, and cultural/ethnic mixing from the territories. everything we think of as "roman" was constantly in flux. if you look solely at centralized political/military power, the western empire clearly fell in the late 400s AD. if you look at cultural influence, you might argue it lives on today in the catholic church.
I recommend sewing your own, or having someone (on Etsy, for example) custom-make it for you. We didn't find any off-the-shelf ones that were good enough.

Here [1] is what our "clown collar" looks like. It's just a loop. There's a hook that keeps it closed, but it's almost impossible to open it while it's on the cat. It sits so snug around the cat's neck that it never gets tangled in anything, and can't fall off, and we take the collar on and off just by pulling the whole thing over the cat's head.

My partner made this by sewing together some brightly coloured fabric with some shiny, reflective stuff.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/2TtG9rm.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... seems like a good lowest bar to hit, incidentally the policy being discussed in this thread was based on it
Why is that ridiculous? Certainly it’s not the sole answer to the problem on its own, but if I were to use (say) a string manipulation library, why should it have access to my filesystem and the internet?
Except, the budget will not be cut by 15M, just reallocated
Does the mention of a "skin museum" bother anyone else?
Why did this at all belong on HackerNews?
Some people did an (albeit informal) experiment trying to find out how much sawdust you can add to a rice krispy treat before people start to notice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDal51f5LU
Notion backlinks: How do they compare to Roam Research?
Disco died pretty early on in the 80s. Flock of Seagulls and Tears for Fears are quintessential 80s IMO.
It's not. This administration has increased the defense budget by $200 billion, cumulatively.
> So, then the user calling the library with foo(3.5) will get a runtime error (or, ok, maybe even a compile time error).

I'm not sure I understand this. See below, but the larger point here is that the type can never lie -- names can and often do because there's no checking on names.

I think what is being proposed is something similar to

newtype Accuracy = Accuracy Float

and then to have the only(!) way to construct such a value be a function

mkAccuracy :: Float -> Maybe Accuracy

which does the range checking, failing if outside the allowable range.

Any functions which needs this Accuracy parameter then just take a parameter of that type.

That way you a) only have to do the check at the 'edges' of your program (e.g. when reading config files or user input), and b) ensure that functions that take an Accuracy parameter never fail because of out-of-range values.

It's still a runtime-check, sure, but but having a strong type instead of just Float, you can ensure that you only need that checking at the I/O edges of your program and absolute assurance that any Accuracy handed to a function will always be in range.

You can do a similar thing in e.g. C with a struct, but unfortunately I don't think you can hide the definition such that it's impossible to build an accuracy_t without going through a "blessed" constructor function. I guess you could do something with a struct containing a void ptr where only the implementation translation unit knows the true type, but for such a "trivial" case it's a lot of overhead, both code-wise and because it would require heap allocations.
There is also a large NSFW scene on reddit.
Isn't it still bad these days to hate classes?
Callbacks and Hot-Reloading Reloaded: Bring Your Own PLT
I propose "pun", as a neologism, for brevity. Easy to postfix.

"Proportion of Unity"
"Proportion of Unity, Normalized".
"P(er) Un" or "Perunage" contracted.

Short, doesn't clash hard with other meanings, is its own mnemonic.

AccuracyPun would be accuracy as a proportion of one.
femPop might be 8000, but femPopPun would have to be [0,1].
I commented on your tone exactly because I frequently find myself agreeing with you when other people don't. If I disagree with someone in both content and tone, I won't bother engaging, I'll just downvote, flag and move on.
Microsoft Defender can ironically be used to download malware
Obvious question is why pension takes overtime pay into consideration in the first place.
When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap.

All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over.

What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.
Keynes conjecture was also blatantly off in assumptions about automatability, divisability of work across multiple people (and overhead), apitude requirements, as nice as a 15 hour work week would be.

The complaints about "usefulness" of job in direct utility are also shortsighted and miss part of why planned systems have a history of failure in farms and consumer good supply. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't important.

Looking at an economy from either a worker's or an owner's view is ironically blinkered - the underlying system is what gives utility and wages to both. A pipeline between supply and demand may print money but adding in loops and needless length (as opposed to say acceleration constraints) wouldn't serve either interest
long term.

Actual bullshit jobs certainly exist and imply a larger scale which can support the load and either enough systemic scale efficiency to counteract the local or just plain a lack of sufficient competitors who would gain an edge from doing away with the bullshit and prosporing or finding out the "bullshit" is actually important.
Direct link if you want to skip straight to engineering examples: https://soapboxhq.com/goal-examples/engineering

The examples are actually in our app (Soapbox) but we decided to surface them publicly as a resource for anyone to use whenever they do goals.

Hoping it's valuable for inspiration
We're currently trying to replace our proprietary backup software by using libvirt snapshot-create-as/blockcommit and borgbackup on raw image.

virsh snapshot-create-as ... --disk-only
borg create .... vmimage.raw
virsh blockcommit ... --active --pivot

borgbackup does compression and deduplication and has a simple command line and excellent documentation (and IRC channel :).

https://www.borgbackup.org/

guestfish/libguestfs is then used if you need specific files within an image instead of a complete restore.

https://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html

Example dump the name of all files on all filesystems:

guestfish --ro -i -a vmimage.raw find /

Can be used to check integrity post backup too, and may be we'll add some file indexing tools.
Yes, exactly this. What I tell my directs when they write their reviews is two things. The lesser one is that I'm a human and I don't remember all the awesome stuff that everyone does through a whole year. So now is the chance to remind me of it.

Secondly, and more relevantly and importantly, I'm about to walk into a shooting match to defend my employees' performances against a larger pool. And what I need in that battle are bullets. The more bullets I have, the more successful I will be. So load up my gun with every single bullet you can think of!
Whats funny to me about this too is that retro gamers come in all ages and would probably think this guys an idiot for writing something like that. "Youngsters" who would even be interested in this article probably already know about Monkey Island, at least theres a good chance. I wouldnt underestimate younger gamers, I know some that know more than me about games I know like the back of my hand.
Supposing one standard is "ban hate speech" and another is "freedom of speech" - how do you choose the higher standard of those two?
Very smart. Except that Apple follows China's laws and censors free speech even outside of China.
I really liked this book:

C Programming: A Modern Approach by K N King

Reading posts like this makes me just only write C code and be done with it.
When making the Thimbleweed park game, they kept a blog.
Its decent and has some interesting tidbits on how they designed the game. I read after I played through to avoid spoilers, but it was a fun game.

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html

There is even some code in there.

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/pseudorooms.html
Have you ever heard of "classical" music? It's a single music genre covering about 500 years of music.

Then, very briefly, the technology of recording music developed to the point where it was commercially viable to mass-market music. As happens with any technological revolution, that triggered a massive spike in innovation. That spike lasted ~50 years, we're just getting to the end of it.

My point is that what happened between ~1950 and ~2000 isn't normal. That's not how fast music normally changes. That was a specific response to a specific stimulus. It will take another stimulus of equal magnitude to provoke a similar level of change.

(also: musicians were almost permanently broke prior to the recording industry. Interesting, and sad, to see that returning too)
Kind of a patronising comment in itself, as if the poor little snowflakes are so weak that they'll run away from tech after an extremely minor bit of ribbing at their expense.
Music is very memorable! I kept the original game disc at my parents’ house so I wouldn’t lose the music. Silly me! There’s an entire internet of folks who won’t let this stuff die.
C11 or c18 dont bring a lot. I wish they did, but they don't.
A pretty solid history. Kinda skipped over the launch of MongoDB Atlas, but this is the only miss in a pretty accurate account.
All empty words. Don't look at what they say, look at what they do; Apple has a long history of acquiescing to the CCP's every demand so that they can keep their access to the Chinese market.

They probably just put this out because they ran some focus groups and determined that this would improve their image among American / European consumers.
I never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks trying to get a single disk to verify. This took hours and at the time blanks were something like 20$ each. I spent the whole night stressing I would get in trouble for spending so much and maybe I should have waited for someone who knew the process better. CTO told me the next day what being a single day late to get them to mfg would have cost and I felt better.
Reddit is completely infested with politics too, many subs that you wouldn't expect to be political are clearly aligned a certain way.
I can't speak for the others but in the case of Dota 2 the "true" subreddit just discusses the strategy of the game itself while the main one posts memes and fan art and talks about meta topics like eSports and the microtransactions.
This is awesome! Would love to see ML eng OKRs in the future as well.

Sharing this with my team and bookmarking.
RedReader is much better experience though.
I have short 15min weeklies with my team members and then other frequent check-in points. By doing this the official review process becomes redundant i.e. no surprises in expectation mismatches - from my side and team this is a good thing but we waste time doing the official stuff.
Takes a while (30~ sec) on Chrome to load, but I don’t think it’s broken. If the author is here, maybe chuck a spinny wheel somewhere in your JavaScript Ajax request.
The rate of change is approximately constant when you adjust for population growth:

https://populationmatters.org/sites/default/files/styles/ful...

Everything moves faster now because there are more people to move it. The rate/person is not that different.

What we have seen since the late 90s is the collapse of musical creativity (at least in popular music... you can still find some creative music if you dig really hard) in spite of population and economic activity continuing to grow. That is not normal. That's a dark age.
That's a little disappointing. It's still more about who you know?
CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, google, and Facebook used Pavlovian style conditioning to radicalize their followers to see all oppositional ideas as facist. Then labeled the supporters Nazis. Then instead of denouncing violence the aforementioned called it peaceful and blocked and still have blocked, all dissent. Repeat narritive over and over orange man bad, America must be destroyed. That content is not only allowed but boosted and monitized.
I’m a big fan of Dr. Deming’s suggestions in this realm (for those not familiar he was involved with helping the auto industry in Japan post WWII among other things). Basically we focus too much on the who and not the what. The manager creates the system to which the worker is involved in, then you judge the employee on your system. So performance reviews are just ways to blame. Instead power needs to be placed in the hands of the employee. They are closest to the problem and the manager is supposed to empower them and basically remove impediments. I’d have to go back to the books but I recall him saying a three tier system but really aimed at seeing what employees need help and those excelling that need to help distribute their expertise to help the processes and continual improvement.
Team Liquid's Director of Comms shares her journey into the esports industry
Yeah, by making the browser experience awful.

No thanks.

I'm weary of installing apps for things I should simply be able to view a browser.

I learned my lesson with Facebook and all the shady things it does.
(Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, but don't speak on behalf of the company. Just sharing some bits about my experience, this is just my experience and doesn't reflect official Policy.)

Prior to working at Amazon, I had mostly worked for start-ups. The thing I found at startup is that people are trying to figure out processes, and it's kind of hard. Most people putting in a process (whether that's HR or the founding team) are trying to do their best, but start-ups aren't at a large enough scale where they really need to have scalable processes, and for individual contributors all the distinctions are pretty informal anyway, so there's usually no individual contributor promotion path.

At Amazon, I was fortunate to work under someone who had been my boss previously, and we had a good working relationship. He was not afraid to give me blunt, useful feedback about either my work or how my work was perceived.

At some of the start-ups I worked with, part of the year-end evaluation involved filling out a form with a lot of evaluation criteria - the employee would fill out a self-eval form, and the manager would fill out a form, and then they would compare during the evaluation meeting. There's no such equivalent at Amazon.

One thing that overall I like about Amazon's performance management in terms of promotions is how it's centered around a document that you and your manager write together. There are some tedious aspects to the process, but if nothing else when you go up for promotion you know what your manager is officially telling other people are your strengths and weaknesses. The flip side of the process is that decisions about your promotion are being made based sometimes on the quality of your promo doc. I'm not sure about all the company, but at least in the team I was on some of the senior folks set aside time for reviewing promo docs that they were working on with other members of the team to iron out any "doc writing" issues.

We don't really have an official OKR system, but as a more senior engineer my personal goal has generally been to enable whatever my team's goal is for the quarter or year (launch this product; get this architecture document done; research how to solve this problem).

Besides the official process, I've also found it useful to ask trusted peers how I'm doing, whether I'm giving them everything they need and expect of me. It's also pretty common to have one or more mentors outside of your team to give you more informal feedback.
Americans basically do the same thing with their cheese, but not because of shortages, it's because they don't want to shred it themselves.
A podcast is an audio file supplied by an RSS feed. Nothing about that supports nor precludes comments.

Many podcasts have a corresponding website, and some of those support comments, but there's nothing about the design of podcasts that requires it.

If you have a particular podcast in mind, perhaps direct your question to the publishers of that podcast, either via twitter or any website they have.
No more or less than any other demographic. If it's that important, someone can put up a website or find another publisher or something.
Manufacturer produced pop’s beginnings are exactly contemporaneous with the invention of recording. Just as soon as people learned that they could sell a recording, they started collecting and selling them. And they took care that what they recorded they could sell. And people did buy it. See the Columbia music hillbilly series for example. The recorders totally looked for the most marketable acts.

They got better at predicting what could sell, but commercialized recording didn’t appear later.

Further, prior to recording, musicians couldn’t make a living without that same broad appeal. People don’t buy tickets to shows they don’t want to see, and patrons don’t commission works from artists they don’t like.

The only artists free from commercial concerns are ones who have money from other things.
They were pirating them. & then another pirate stole their booty trove.
It was pretty standard (at least on paper) in my last company (a top 10 bank in terms
of total assets).

1. Agree OKRs with managers in the beginning of the year (to be completed by March).
Everyone at same level/hierarchy will have same baseline.

2. Performance evaluation in October. Employees discuss their achievements with
managers.

3. Results disclosed in February.

This waterfall-ish process never really worked:

1. Over the year priorities change, teams evolve, and products take new directions. So,
everyone used to put vague OKRs.

2. Evaluation process is a black box. Performance metrics (if there really were any) were never disclosed, and were calibrated at multiple levels.

3. You get to know only your evaluation. No data to compare to whatsoever.

I've seen this doing damage only. People with good visibility, and network used to get
better ratings despite average work. Silent hard-workers will get average ratings, and
will leave.
Ah, thank you. I was pretty sure it would be something like this, but couldn't find details anywhere else.
That's assuming you have the add inventory a some point reducing costs make sense
Y'all are so uncreative.

How about `float bool` or `fbool`.

Or `fbit`...

Or what about an `fowen`? (floating oh + one)

;-)
Just to pick up on one of your examples:

> When I order something I like getting the emails saying 'your package has been shipped...", and they typically come from a donotreply address.

I almost never want to reply to these. On the rare occasion when there’s a problem with the shipment, however, replying to this email feels like the right thing to do.
Of course the literal meaning of "normalisation" is to make more "normal", and that can mean almost anything at all. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to starts with "normalization can have a range of meanings". If you have heard that word most used with one meaning and I have heard it most used with another meaning then that doesn't invalidate either of those definitions.

The Wikipedia article you linked to gives two very broad definitions in the lead. The definition covered in the first paragraph is "adjusting values measured on different scales to a notionally common scale", which seems to be what you're talking about.

The definition covered in the second paragraph is "the creation of shifted and scaled versions of statistics", in particular "some types of normalization involve only a rescaling, to arrive at values relative to some size variable". I'm not comfortable with the use of "of statistics" in that second definition: the very first example is in the article standard score [1], which is about a rescaled element of the population, not a rescaled statistic. In any case, outside of statistics, a rescaling is a common meaning for this word, and a rescaled statistic is clearly just a special case of this. I think it was clear from the context that we were talking about this meaning originally. By far the most common case of this is a linear rescaling (including translation) to [0,1] but I was already up front that this is just a special case.

As for your sigmoid comment, I may have misunderstood but it sounds like you're saying that if you have a variable in the range in [0,1] then it can be described as the result of a sigmoid function. My objection to this is the same as my original objection to calling such as variable "normalised": it is a confusing variable name to use unless you actually did get it by applying a sigmoid function to something, not just because it holds a value that could hypothetically be obtained from a sigmoid function (but you didn't).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score
> Fonts are copyrighted, so any of the countless pictures of text you see online are infringing

Font files are subject to copyright as code, but the resultant rendered character is not subject to copyright in the US [0]. This usually means that distributing a document with an embedded font file is a potential copyright violation while distributing pre-rendered text (such as a screenshot) is not.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
No.

LLVM is not amenable to using multiple threads to compile a single TU. The use-lists of global values (such as functions, global variables, or constant expressions) include all uses from all functions, so parallelizing on a per-function basis requires acquiring locks (or some sort of lock-free data structure) to add, remove, or iterate these lists, which would considerable overhead on a relatively common operation.

If you want more details, you can read the recent thread on llvm-dev discussing this: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-March/139606.h...
Cloud Cost Optimization
People give it a lot of crap, but honestly: It's better than Temple of Doom.