skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading and heavily agreeing with this post, I came to the conclusion that either goodreads is not really trying, or -more likely- the data is just not good enough to make decent recommendations. There are so many biases in the review data that are impossible to fix in any kind of sparse matrix recommendation algorithm. For those who want to try anyway, it might be worth downloading an existing dataset (1) (104 million reviews) and try, before worrying about scraping and api limits.

The only solution (in my experience) is to get some other way of quantifying content, like Spotify does by manually labelling tracks. After some ddg I found storygraph (2), which does this. Its search engine is quite impressive, might be worth trying.

[1] https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/ucsdbookgraph/home
[2] https://beta.thestorygraph.com
Needing offices doesn't mean needing them centralized neccessarily. It depends on domain as usual for how close it actually has to be. A doctor's office? Yeah. But if you have accounting siloed off anyway why not just go full remote? They aren't needed there.
I have called up the waste disposal departments now in three different cities I've lived in (Somerville, Boulder, Oakland) and in none of the cases did the people working there have a clue about how recycling works. They just didn't know anything about plastic.

I'd be like "can I recycle polystyrene (number 6) here" and they'd answer with "put any rigid plastic in the recycling" and I'm just like... that is not how it works...

Surprise -- none of those three cities can recycle polystyrene. That's what those clamshells are usually made of. Same material as packing peanuts, potentially my least favorite invention of the modern shipping industry.
In Britain, we deal with this problem partly by allowing proxy voting, where you can expressly authorise someone else to vote (in person) on your behalf. I had to do this once when my wife had an unexpected business trip after the postal vote registration deadline had closed. It's obviously not ideal from a vote privacy point of view, but it does provide a useful solution to some of the corner cases preventing voting in person or by mail.
Is it? You buy a 500$ computer and off you go, no extra costs. Same if you get a computer for Windows or Linux. Same if you target a different device, you still need to get that development system, regardless of the vendor.
Cape Town, South Africa, 1679 -still used in part as a military base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_Good_Hope
Where to Drive for Clean Air
A story that directly or indirectly harms people is always bad.
I live in an apartment complex, so we have different receptacles for each. But for single-family homes there are usually segmented so you have different subsections for each like this: https://www.rambo.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/fyrfackskrl-...

When I lived in my last apartment I carried the glass/plastic/paper/cardboard and so on a block over to a public recycling station, so that was a lot less convenient but I think they have dedicated receptacles now.
> The first known radar observations of a confirmed tornado were made at the Illinois State Water Survey on the 9th of April 1953.

http://www.chill.colostate.edu/w/CHILL_history#The_First_Tor...
Live coding an Emacs config from scratch
Unless it's right before the election. Or maybe your ballot left your house and didn't make it back to the counting location. These aren't theoretical concerns, they're happening today [1][2][3]. And we see in some cases, there is a political bias pattern involved in election-related mail getting "lost"[4]. People affiliated with both parties have been involved in wrongdoing.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/three-tubs-of-ballot...

[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...!

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/us/politics/wisconsin-ele...

[4] https://noqreport.com/2020/06/28/caught-on-camera-postal-wor...
Do you recommend books based on ML or do you hand pick books you want to promote because you think they should be promoted or have been paid to promote them?
Viral Issue Crucial Update Sept 8th: The Science, Logic and Data Explained
I have a high spec phone running Sailfish OS, and I think I have the best of both worlds. With all notifications and push updates turned off it's a useful tool but no longer intrudes. I've set up periods of the day when even phone calls don't trigger audible alerts, so I can work without interruption. But when I need access to information, Slack conversations, files from our NAS or even SSH access to servers themselves, I have that anywhere in the world.

A lot of the time it stays in my bag, and gets to the end of the day with 75% charge left despite reading books on it over lunch, often watching an hour's video on it in the evening, and listening to music via bluetooth at work if I need to shut out distractions.

It's now a tool and no longer an intrusion.
What matters for glass is impurity content, in particular iron, I think, if you want clear glass.
> fresh and clean sand

The thing many people don't know is that not all sands are equal.

For example desert sand is not usable for cement or other building purpose. We are currently running out of sand usable for it and are scrapping it from the sea ground or islands, both doing MAJOR environmental damage.

For glass the context is a bit different the sand needed for glass production seems to be readily available, at least in the EU (source German Wikipedia article about Quarzsand, no english version).

But producing (bottle) glass from recycling glass needs much less energy then producing it from sand.

Furthermore recycling glass bottles isn't too hard to do, especially if you produce green glass.

In Germany in average 60% of glass used to produce a bottle is recycled, for green bottles its up to 95% for mineral wool it's up to 80%. (German Wikipedia).

(As a side note only bottles go in the glass recycling bin, class from e.g. a broken window does not belong there!)
I have difficulties to understand if that's US specific or also a problem in Europe and the rest of the world.

For example, I'm reading this article from 2011 that mentions that 77% of Japan's plastic is recycled: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/japan-le...

Is that complete bullshit too, or is something possible to actually achieve, just not in the US?
We’re running out of beach and construction sand, which needs to be somewhat coarse to be functional. Desert sand particles are too fine, alkali content is too high, and is generally full of contaminants.
I often wish there were more direct citations in journalistic articles. I hate to say this, but often when trying to find sources it is cluttered up by news articles.
It seems to be implied with the closing of their Boston office that the whole staff is remote, not just this person.
A megasecond is a useful quantity: it's a bit less than 12 days. I mentally approximate it to a fortnight, partly because of the VMS bootloader which used microfortnights as an approximation for seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...

Another handy time_t approximation is that a year is about 2^25 seconds, or 32 megaseconds.
He should have said what that difference is.
Mid level managers and their empire building ... found we function better without them and they are not required.
A slow motor cycle is called a moped
And sometimes I wonder, if that PR problem from so long ago eventually gave birth to current conspiracy theories linked to Bill Gates.

Or maybe I’ve read too much Douglas Adams...
yeah, will leave it there for people to marvel at my unnecessary tangent :)
I dont think it was just being man- child. It was being businessman in competition.

Bullies do well in business.
There's an Ex-NSA in the board of Amazon now.
“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

-Blair Warren, "The One Sentence Persuasion Course: 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding"
How to Get Started Developing Black and White Film for £25 (Or Less)
https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.9261109,18.4279941,373m/dat...
SoftBank is reportedly close to selling ARM to Nvidia
Upvoting for Inconsolata.
it's like any holyday, it's a rendezvous for the community that recognizes it. it strengthens the social bonds
I remember in Germany there used to be bins for green glass, brown glass, and clear glass.
I can concede that there's not necessarily anything "outside" the spacetime bubble. The evidence of nothing is not the existing of something.
What do you envision as the business model for this site? Pay to subscribe? Ad-supported? Free, supported by donations?
Commute time is a big thing here.

People who have a 2 hour (one way) commute from hell from their massive house are super happy about this situation (shocking, I know).

People who live in a small studio apartment 10 minutes from the office see it differently.

What I expect this to result in is employers increasingly forcing people to WFH (either outright, or by making the offices horribly unattractive through hot-desking, increased density, etc.), pushing the cost of an office onto employees.

Even if a company "generously" gives you a $1000 allowance, that barely covers what high quality office furniture would cost, and in exchange, you pay a lot of tiny things that don't seem to be worth mentioning individually but add up to a massive cost when you take them all together over years:

- the real estate

- HVAC

- utilities (increased water usage, electricity for the office equipment & HVAC)

- maintenance for all of that (money and time)

- cleaning (if your employer asked you to come in unpaid after hours to vacuum the office and scrub the office toilets, everyone would consider them crazy, and yet this is effectively what will happen with WFH)

Not to speak of all the amenities and perks employers often provide, like cafeterias (often subsidized or even free). And not only will you end up paying the businesses' business expenses, you'll often do so (at least in part) with your post-tax money, i.e. depending on your tax rate, each dollar spent may be equivalent to e.g. $1.6 in lost income.
Change your recursive-descent parser so it pulls source tokens from a socket as opposed to RAM. All networking IO is expected to fail. You probably don’t want to handle socket errors in the parser because there’s nothing you can do about them there. You want to handle them very far away, telling user you’re unable to parse stuff due to a network error.

Some libraries expose parallel APIs for these two cases. For example, hash maps from C# standard library exposes both operator[] which throws exceptions when trying to get a value that does not exist, and TryLookup which returns a boolean.

Overall, I think exceptions are solid in C#. There’s only one class of exceptions there, they can include lower-level ones, can aggregate multiple of them, for native interop they have 32-bit integer codes and runtime support to converting codes to/from exceptions, have runtime support to preserve contexts to re-throw later (e.g. on another thread). Uncaught exceptions become hard crashes.
"Roll your own crypto" may not be entirely bad either.

Suppose that you encrypt your message using "my own crypto". The result is ciphertext that looks like a random bit sring. Then encrypt the ciphertext using a standard algorithm such as AES.

An attacker will have difficulty since a successful decryption of AES is hard to recognize as such.
Don't write code like this... trying to fake sum types in an object oriented language ends up being a horrible, hard to maintain mess, similar to those examples on the original post.

Typescript's "discriminated unions" [1] make for incredibly inelegant looking code for anything but the most basic sum types, the ergonomics are nothing like the experience of using Haskell or OCaml.

I love sum types but in an OOP the equivalent implementation is the visitor pattern (if the problem calls for it). I was once starry eyed about "making invalid states irrepresentable". I even managed to introduce a code generator to bolt sum types into a production Dart app. My colleagues loved it (not) :-)

Thing is, programs have this annoying tendency of being incorrect no matter what technique you use :-), there's no silver bullet! If a pattern is natural for a given language, it is better to use that pattern than to force it to be something it isn't.

1: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/unions-and-inte...
That's 4+ hours if you count initial setup, meet, breaks, etc.
Well these folks will probably not have much context on what you are doing though. Offices are nice because people working in them have some shared reality, vision and goals. I know that the service or tool I build or use is built or used by another team for a specific purpose. A lot of the innovations I’ve seen happening are because humans with this shared reality try to solve one others problems, or at least talk about it. Many times, others will also actually help out if someone is stuck on something.

We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality somehow. Video conferences don’t do that. I’m sure there will be some innovation that might, I’m betting on cheap, high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone with touchscreens had to be invented for something revolutionary to happen...
> Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical conductivity

Yeah, what I meant by better segmentation is not to separate them from each other (we do that) but rather by type. Some plastics are easier to recycle than others and I don't know if metals can be easily and automatically sorted from each other.
Maybe. My point was that even even network jitter won’t be important, since software processing latencies are much higher. If a server handles another request before your handshake that’s thousands more instructions which obfuscate the result. If it does another TLS handshake before it’s thread might be blocked for several ms before it gets to processing the next thing. That’s all orders of magnitudes higher than any „this tool longer because some bits are different“ measurements
Actix Web v3.0
But she's not making new laws here. She's declaring that they're breaking old laws that already exist - and a huge portion of the public case she's presenting is "well, I don't like how they're using their power". It's like seeing a DA indict a guy for murder, and then deliver a bunch of press conferences about how he's a greedy businessman who'll no longer be able to get away with overcharging the public for poor quality services.
The recycling rate for gold also asymptotically approaches 100%. There's plenty of money in recycling catalytic converters too. There's probably some clever economic law waiting for someone to name it after himself about recycling of metals and their market value.

Also we've all heard stories of, let's call it aggressive proactive copper recycling.
I don't know about rats, but we called animal control on an aggressive gator. And the guy who came out sat down on the side of the pond with a boombox playing a cassette tape of some weird noises. Gator swam right up to him and he then disposed of it.

I don't know that it's that far fetched to think that at least the rats part could possibly have been true.

As for the gator cassette, I asked and was told it's gator mating sounds. The bad news was that he then said that to catch the mate, the cassette won't work and he would have to use chicken.
I think that concerns about this being the end of Arm are overdone - I expect that the UK government will get some assurances about maintaining the HQ in the UK etc and that Arm's business is sufficiently different to Nvidia's to make wholesale merger with Nvidia's existing operations counterproductive.

However, I can't see how they will avoid enormous conflicts of interest between Nvidia and other competing Arm customers and that this will be to the detriment of everyone who makes and uses Arm based products (except Nvidia).
In WA ballots are mailed out to voters a month before the election, giving plenty of time to request a new one. If a voter doesn't mail it in time there are in-person drop off spots (basically big dedicated mailboxes) all over town leading up to and on election day.
Direct link to repo: https://github.com/actix/actix-web
> How do people build recommendation engines?

One method, collaborative filtering with latent factor analysis, popularized by its efficacy in making recommendations on Netflix, is to use matrix multiplication to solve the problem.

E.G. Let’s say you have all users (rows) x all books (columns), in a massive sparsely populated matrix, where the value is the rating that user gives a book.

To make recommendations, the goal is to “guess“ what a user would rate a book they haven’t read, and if your guess is they would give it 5 stars, and then you recommend it, and the user gives it 5 stars, it’s a good recommendation.

The “latent factor” idea is breaking the problem up, so in order to compute the rating matrix that is the final size N users by M books, you split it into:

N users x D latent factor
(cross product)
D latent factor x M books
=
N users x M books

It then becomes a machine learning problem, using a loss function plus gradient descent, to solve for that D latent factor.

Customers with a similar latent factor, will have similar taste.

Once you have the latent factors, you find the nearest neighbors (the closest other latent factor vectors measured by dot product or cosine similarity), to compute the nearest books. The vectors that multiply together to give the highest rating, will be the best recommendations for the user.
Why aren't "blue" states going after Google, that's the real question. It's as though they might prefer Google to be an insurmountable monopoly with total control of web search or something.

Google doesn't know it yet, BTW, but it will benefit from increased competition, just like Microsoft did. I was at MS when Google became a force to reckon with, and we used to joke that if Google did not exist, MS would just consist entirely of sales people, lawyers, and managers of all sorts. It was not uncommon at the time to have 1:1 program manager (aka people who mostly just sit in meetings and report "status" to each other) to dev ratio in teams. This is _excluding_ people managers. With competition in place you have to actually hire people who can do the work, and pay them well so that competition doesn't hire them away from you.

Google's org hierarchy when I left a few years ago was already 2 levels deeper than Microsoft's in late 00s, so I'd argue it's well on its way there. It's an inevitable consequence of not having to compete. You grow a massive amount of counterproductive barnacles.
Recycling is a hack to try to fix the downside of another hack.

The other hack is that the cost of trash disposal is artificially depressed to reduce the incentive to dispose of refuse by illegal dumping. But this means refuse is overproduced.

Recycling is an attempt to reduce this increased volume of refuse going into landfills.

The better strategy would be to charge a fee, up front, for all goods that reflects their cost of disposal. This would be used to subsidize disposal in whatever way was most economical (recycling, landfilling, incineration). It would discourage overpackaging and encourage products that were easier to dispose of.
It will almost certainly include a very large equity component.
Show HN: Stochastic time tracking online
I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal.

ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likely use that position to strong-arm competition. This will push vendors out of ARM and into some alternative ISA. While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V, it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time. Finally we're starting seeing huge convergence on ARM in Mobile/Desktop/Server space. One ISA to rule them all! Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years.

Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong. I really don't want to be so pessimistic about this.
See the definition of seconds since the epoch at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...

tm_sec + tm_min*60 + tm_hour*3600 + tm_yday*86400 +
(tm_year-70)*31536000 + ((tm_year-69)/4)*86400 -
((tm_year-1)/100)*86400 + ((tm_year+299)/400)*86400
isn't sequestering carbon a good thing?
Deploying End-to-End Data Science with Shiny, Plumber, and Pins
But they don't allow hot-rodding their phones. They're pretty much forcing the tech folks out of their business.

The whole group of people who might start with swapping a graphics card, and move towards their own pc build with watercooling are being forced out of the apple market.

Even the old mac pro is replaced by this phenomenally expensive beast that nobody would hotrod (except for maybe a sheik)
This was written by someone who has no idea what a deposition is about, or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The USG's depositions were PR stunts, filmed on purpose to make Gates look bad.

If you've ever been deposed (and I have), then you know that Gates' approach was close to optimal when dealing with lawyers.

Bill's biggest mistake was having a terrible attitude and bad posture when answering questions. He made it too personal. Otherwise, the strict answers were mostly ideal and are often used as tutorials by attorneys to show those two things:

1) How not to have the posture/tone/etc in your voice when answering questions, but...

2) ...that this is an adversarial discussion and you should seek extreme clarity every single time.
ML publication is a complete mess right now.

Anyone can claim anything as long as they do a write-up and include some equations and pretty plots.

It was hard enough 5 years ago to filter out handful of good papers from the sea of bad research. Now it's getting near impossible.
> Tahoe for example. If you can’t work from home, it’s unlikely you’ll find another job locally.

That’s the situation now, but after 1000 remote tech workers move there and 500 decide not to go back to the city, 100 might pivot to lifestyle startups that employ 100-200 more. And now you have a little incubator that wasn’t there before and might grow a nice little self-sustaining eco-system. And once it gets going, it can always rely on the nice geography to attract some talent, even if the cities become huge employment centers again.

In a way, I think this would be a very healthy development for these tourist towns. They are too dependent on tourism, and even when they were prosperous before Covid, they had issues with high property prices (due to empty second homes and Airbnb) and low service wages. Having a healthy middle class independent of tourism would be great for their economic stability.
I started https://MyBookList.club over a decade ago and always stayed away from recommendations. They're never going to satisfy everyone. The closest thing is "similar books".
There is not a single piece of scientific base for any cataclysmic damage, on the contrary fossil fuel have made the world safer for those who use it.
Ruby: Time#utc Changes the Receiver
Plenty of countries have excellent trash burning plants already, all the technology exists. You only need to compete with peak oil burner plants, not the entire power producing chain. Same co2 emissions, a bit less electricity, but the trash doesn't go on horrible polluting landfills. Win-win.
I will just leave this here.

http://kirkmcd.princeton.edu/JEMcDonald/mcdonald_aaas_69.pdf