skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There were large unitary empires in India before the Mughals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires_in_Ind...

It even had a name before that: Bharat.

And on Buddhism, unfortunately the story is more complex and not as rosy.

Buddhism unfortunately still has/had sects and castes (as do even Christianity and Islam in India). Here is an article:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/14500421.pdf

One of the outstanding examples of such an ideologisation of history of religion is the modern view of Buddhism. Developed by the Western colonialist Indology this ideology portrayed and still is portraying Buddhism as an rationalist-atheistic, anti-brahmanical, anti-caste and egalitarian religion - in contrast to Hinduism which is caricatured as idolatrous, casteistic and brahmanised. The aim of such an ideological interpretation is to demonstrate the alleged Western modernity of Buddhism and the alleged obscurantism of Hinduism."

We want to dispute these asserted positions by empirico-historical reasons.
Working in a large company (albeit much smaller than Microsoft) gave me an appreciation that there are many disparate voices in a company but it only takes one to sour a relationship. So then you have situations where one department is doing their job by trying to engage with the Linux community while another is doing their job by closing things off. Legal requirements and culture can make it hard for some of those voices to change course. In companies like these I see the main role of the executives being to marshall the voices in a shared direction, vision and understanding.

A consequence of this is that an unintentional mis-step by someone of relatively low seniority can be seen as intentional strategy from the overall entity.
A tool plus your determination. When there is a will there is a way. The tools is just an anecdote.
I generally agree that there is nothing new under the sun. But I also think history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.

> When to mainframes kind of suck? Well when you don't know whether or not you want to use them. ... Ending up, nearly exactly back where they started except that now one company owns a mainframe and dozens of companies use it to run their bits of code.

I think this reveals that there is an economic distinction between mainframes and serverless, along two fronts: size of commitment and economies of scale. Mainframe time could be extremely precisely subdivided when billing users, but the capital cost of getting to the first kilosecond was extremely high. In serverless settings the capital cost for the first unit of consumption is experienced as zero by everyone except the vendor.

(Yes, IBM runs mainframes-as-a-service, but they don't do it on the cheap).

The second difference is that the hyperscalers enjoy economies of scale and scope that no other organizations can match, including mainframe operations. If IBM is choosing between two different parts for a mainframe, they can pick the more expensive part and foist most of the cost onto their buyers, for whom there is little alternative. Meanwhile, for the hyperscalers, customers are much more price sensitive. More expense falls to their bottom line. But because they operate at such high scale, even tiny improvements are rational to pursue.

Similarly, economies of scope come from the fact that they can pool much larger amounts of variance, which makes their workloads more predictable overall than any smaller organisation can achieve. This is just the central limit theorem mercilessly steamrolling noise into smooth, predictable shapes.

But at least no punched cards.
Can't even read the article since it's behind a paywall.

But as someone who's been working remotely since before the pandemic, the key for me is to not work from home, ie. either work out of coffee shops or coworking spaces.

Of course the problem with COVID is that coffee shops are takeout only and coworking spaces are closed, so that's not an option at the moment (at least in the U.S.).

Working from home is awesome one or two days out of a week, but depressing after weeks and weeks. But then again I feel the same about offices as well, and hell just living in the same city year after year. The beauty of remote work is that you can go wherever you want, wake up whenever you want, and aren't tethered to a location. Once you taste that freedom, it's hard to give it up.
> You can't maintain a cluster of things in orbit without actively expending propellent.

Well, or physically connecting them with tethers. (Bonus: you no longer need wireless communications between them. Malus: pretty much everything else about this design.)
I'm not really interested in having the 1,000th discussion about the definition of "serverless". The parent was wondering what the value of the paradigm is, so I provided a list of specific features that many companies consider valuable with serverless offerings.
That is pretty interesting. When I worked at Google I could spin up thousands of workers just to test the real world performance of different distributed strategies. Definitely worth it in the long run, servers aren't that expensive and there are a lot of issues you hit when you start having tons of servers instead of what you can simulate locally.
IMO it would be pretty useful for Reddit too: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reddit.com
I think these problems are unique to your type of home maybe.

I have been to a Bone Structure presentation. They fabricate all parts and interfaces using computer operated cutters with extreme precision from CAD plans. Note that parts are made of metal, not wood.

The structure is then aligns perfectly and all connection holes align perfectly as well.

The building is then assembled using just an electric screw driver, on sight. They claimed that almost anyone could do it, like IKEA. But they still require skilled technicians. But the point was that it isn’t a rocket science and plans are designed in such a way that you can’t really mess it up too much.
Does CA typically have this many statewide ballot measures? The state voter guide must be huge and cost millions to mail out.
What is a better developer in an organization with 1000s of developers that have to collaborate in their team, cross teams etc. I am really curious in your definition of a better developer.
How did you audition them? what did you use in addition to the modeler?
Why? I'm sure Google has tons of historical data, and they have a large enough pool of developers where they likely get very consistent productivity metrics across the company. If they see an obvious, statistically significant dip in the number of changelists companywide, this seems like very useful data.
The article lampshades, but imo doesn't really address, the fact that it doesn't really address the title?

Like, it brings up the "you haven't said what probability can't do" response, and then kinda jukes by combining that with the "probability is just math and the math is fine", and responding primarily to the latter part.

It brings up the "it would be unreasonable to use probability theory to plan a picnic" point. Sure, granted. But the title doesn't say "It isn't reasonable/feasible to compute explicit probabilities in all cases." , it says what probability _can't_ do.

And the article does not demonstrate the existence of something that probability _can't_ do.

The main content of the page might be, fine I guess (I'm having trouble finding it), but it doesn't address what the title says it addresses.

What are the things that probability can't do? What I'm asking for, which is my initial interpretation of the title, is not merely a single example, but rather an explanation of a _class_ of things which "probability can't do". It doesn't have to be a complete characterization, but it should give a sufficient condition for something to be something that "probability can't do".

If you have a single example which you can demonstrate that "probability can't do", you should be able to take that example, and then ask "what things could I change in this example without changing the validity of the argument?", which should then give you a broader class of things which "probability can't do".

The article by nostalgabraist which this article links to, I like much more.
Especially section 8.

I saw another post on lesswrong semi-recently which talked about Jeffry updates, and Jeffrey Bolker's broader generalized probability theory ideas. That was pretty good I thought. The point about updating on an uncertain observation (the "Jeffry updates") part I especially thought was convincing.

___

So far, the real shortcomings in the base form of ("strong") bayesian probability that I see/understand are :

1) observations we make are not suddenly gaining perfect certainty of a proposition, but rather some sense experiences. We may not be entirely sure of what we are seeing.

2) we have bounded computation and memory, and as such:

2.i) we cannot enumerate all the possibly hypotheses that could be relevant

2.ii) we cannot process all of the logical implications even just between the different hypotheses that we do consider
"The solid material left over was almost exclusively carbon nanotubes" . . . very highly contaminated CNT's at that, with plenty of iron and aluminum ions.
Note that these are tactics for metaprogramming - the tactics are themselves for programming, not for use in programs. The commands to the LSP tell it how to generate the code, and the code sticks around for editing afterwards.

>If it's just to be used by the LSP: What is the point of using tactics vs normal metaprogramming?

What is "normal" metaprogramming? The particular benefit of using tactics would be that they're designed for small steps of in-flight editing, rather than generating something all at once; and that their vocabulary is pretty well established.
Still nothing compared to typical RGB control software, that on Windows only runs while actively logged in (stops when locking the screen/desktop) instead of a tight/light service that uses the "last known" config that updates from the desktop/gui. Let alone painfully missing tecnical docs or support for Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Peac...
You just need to then overlay a function that takes the remainder of the prediction / 2. Perfect model fit and a seemingly sensible prediction for next time :P All ready for media consumption :)

/data scientist here people. Please don't actually do that.
yea good point.. that would be a challenge for sure.. yea it would only take a couple of performance reviews before people got the message that they either need to move back to an on-site job situation or time to find another job.. so as a result the most likely scenario would be either entire org's would go all remote, or whole companies, or not at all.. the random lone wolf working from home will likely be the same set the company had before.. people working from like Zurich who is some machine learning genius or something, but otherwise, all the remaining people slowly trickle back into the office over the next 2 years..
I've worked as a UX designer, and I think the mindset required to solve UX problems is just different to that required to solve engineering problems.

For example: The engineering needed to have the user select, crop, adjust, and upload a photo is not easy. But getting that functional is just half the challenge. Knowing how to make the UX be easy is another domain of thinking. That's why we have different people doing different jobs.
To follow up: I believe the original paper introducing tactics is Milner's still excellent "The Use of Machines to Assist in Rigorous Proof" from 1984 [1].

The basic idea is that a "tactic" is a function which inputs some abstract goal and outputs a pair consisting of subgoals and a mechanism by which the solutions to those subgoals can be combined into a solution to the original goal. This is a very general notion, but it was mostly influential in Milner's style of theorem prover. To this day, most proofs in HOL systems such as HOL4 and HOL Light are just combinations of tactics.

That tactics could potentially be used in Haskell is just a reflection of the fact that Haskell's type system has a connection to propositional logic, where Milner's tactics become a mechanism by which to come up with a program (solution) matching a type (goal).

There's nothing buzzwordy about this.

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984RSPTA.312..411M/abstra...
On top of that, you are looking into a light source. If you were reading a book or newspaper you'd probably want more light.
I'm absolutely LOVING that airplanes fly over every 48 hours where I'm at instead of 5 - 10 times a day.
If you earned your privilege, how does that not make you privileged nonetheless?
Centaurs: The Future of Work?
So many times on HN I feel we disagree because we each touch different parts of the elephant(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant).

Systems programmers have different experiences than web developers who have different experiences from ML researchers. Things that benefit junior Ruby devs may make no sense for a middle aged, embedded dev working for the defense industry.

There are people who benefit greatly from side projects, and others who should never bring them up in an interview. I don't think anyone should be significantly swayed by the arguments I've seen here so far. Know your situation and react accordingly. Don't lose sight of the complex world of software and how many times the experiences of others only apply loosely, if at all, to your situation.
Not only this, but the premise that working on your job will impress recruiters is just wrong.

There's a pretty simple flow chart for getting hired at a bay area company:

1. Go to MIT, Stanford, Cal, an Ivy, or CalTech and make sure you have linked in.

2. If 1 isn't possible then make a friend who works where you want to work and get a referral.

3. Cram leetcode

That's basically it.

Don't give up doing side projects and things you actually enjoy because that's how you learn.

I think you're also overly harsh on recruiters (they're not 'bottom-feeders'), they're friendly and can help you out - but they're just looking in a very narrow subset. Basically the graduates from those schools and people already employed at FAANGs.
Some (quite misguided) people on Hacker News think the site shouldn't accept humor in any form.
Wouldn't even say that, I've experienced regressions/bugs on intel drivers for laptops a few times.

In general, it's kind of a crapshoot no matter which way you go, and expect pain if the gpu chipset is less than a year old.
If you alreay have a large repertoire of shortcuts it’s an extra pail to worry about when making the switch. I find that im using some shortcut that i can’t recite what they unless look down at the keyboard as they’ve embedded in the muscle memory.
> mobile operator or my bank

Yeah no, these companies should NEVER be calling people, period. It's way to easy to phish people for information by calling them and claiming to be their bank. Too many people will fall for it:

"Hi, this is SomeDude from Bank of America, and we noticed some suspicious activity on your account. Before we go further I would just like to confirm your identity. Could you please provide your name? Your address? Your mother's maiden name? The last four digits of your SSN?"

Banks should adopt a policy of only interacting with customers physically, via their web interface with a login, official mobile app, or by the user calling the bank's official, publicized number. Never by calling the user.

That way they can post big signs saying "We will never call you, if someone calls you claiming to be us, it's fake" and people will get it.
With all your comments in this thread I think you're protesting a bit much.
BGP hijacks are pretty obvious though if they were to do that.
I don't know enough physics to comment on the effect of different media on EM emissions but from what I understand any potential effects would not be significant enough to negate an order of magnitude difference due to the the nature of broadcasting or even beam-forming a stream of data v.s. sending it down a physical channel that is in comparison a point to point use of resources to manipulate bits (ALU ops, SRAM r/w, Flash r/w).

Might be able to find the paper I'm referencing. Will post tomorrow.
... ah.
> I also sometimes wonder if this isn't because my eyes just don't get tired from screens

I don't have the eye fatigue, either. My hunch is it's because I turn my display brightness way down, down far enough that coworkers insist they can't see my screen when I show them something. It seems like colleagues keep their screens near full brightness. I could imagine that being tough to look at all day.
I think we really need to be more specific about working situations than "at home" or "not at home".

Because there are vast differences between specific circumstances. For example, people who are working at home but also suddenly become substitute teachers to keep their kids on task who are also there, are in a totally different situation than people who have a nice quiet home office and no kids.

Also, the specific software setup and operating rules will have a massive difference. For example, people who need to collaborate daily and don't have a good rule for a meeting or a solid whiteboard tool or whatever they need, if they don't make that connection adequately, they are going to lag.

Or if you are just talking about basic motivation, the interaction rules and software setup will also make a huge difference. If there were somewhat ad-hoc assignments and check-ins that kept people somewhat more motivated before and then all of that is just dropped, the motivation will go down. Now ideally what you have instead is just good management, intrinsic motivation and properly chunked-out results-oriented sprints, strong async and written communication, etc.

Or in the opposite direction, if the boss realizes that now he doesn't need to go stand over your shoulder to check in with you or add a task since he can just message you on Slack at any time, that could also turn into a drag on programmer productivity.

So it's really dependant on a lot of specific factors and not just whether they are in an office or not. And I feel like discussions will need to break down some of those details to be useful.
Apply to the Zerofirst Ventures network to help startups build with zero carbon
You left out 18 years in that story so it's hard to tell.
My model is a hashmap that contains my training data. Missing keys are forecast uniformly randomly. It perfectly matches 100% of my training data.
Man, whatever you're working on must be incredibly interesting and difficult to necessitate a language with the advanced tools necessary to translate even the most abstract of thoughts into code.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to write a web app that accepts this API and returns these things... and implement auth... sigh.
>more likely a mix is going to be a good setup.. where very likely new people should expect to be onsite for fairly extended periods of time until they have a much better sense of what to work on

The model that I have seen with moderate-to-great levels of success at the large consulting companies (which have long had a strong remote work culture) is that the companies schedule new hires so that all new hires start at the same time every year, and for "new hire training", the company rents out an entire hotel for 2 months and has all new hires stay there. Those 2 months then are a mixture of intensive job training and social events.

By the end, all of the new hires have received plenty of training, had good conversations with managers/leadership about what type of work is expected, and IMO most importantly, have had a chance to make very strong bonds with coworkers that then become your "cohort" for the next 1-2 years that you can ask questions about work, collaborate, commiserate, or even become friends outside of work. The strong bond developed over those 2 months is important because that "cohort" is then more likely to stay in contact even after splitting up to work remotely.

I went through such a training program at the beginning of my career and it was the best company onboarding experience I've been through, not only in terms of personally enjoying it, but also just from the perspective of setting me up for success at the company and in my career.
It's a point of view, but more often than not it is simply a justification for past actions.
The future will be no different if people continue to believe or dismiss theories without first confronting the arguments and evidence that validates or invalidates them (in a healthy marketplace of ideas).

I never subscribed to flat earth theory, but did I learn about it and read the subsequent material confronting it? Yes.

It wasn't a waste of time because it served as a valuable mental exercise that helped me improve my discernment.

Discernment is the precise thing I need to avoid being taken in by false ideologies or beliefs. I can't obtain discernment by excluding everything that doesn't already fit my preconceived notions or the carefully crafted consensus of echo chambers.

Maybe while researching something I discover that there is some truth to it or that there are valid reasons why people believe what they do. Perhaps the final conclusion is not supported by evidence, but some of the evidence supporting it is in-fact very compelling. Then, I can come to my own conclusion and be better informed without subscribing to the theory (in whole or in part).
Cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20201011095019/https://diyodemag...
This is true! I didn't really choose to WFH personally. Instead, the startup I work for decided to ditch the office and go fully-remote. It ended up working out better for me than others, and personality definitely plays a big role.
Nope. Any time you are looking at a tuple in the existing heap, you have to test it for visibility against your snapshot. With zheap, it's much the same, except that, rather than just "yes or no", the answer could be that you have to following an update chain into the undo log to get an older version.
Self flying cars, c'mon!
Old used cars are great most of the time, but they sometimes break for no reason, or require non-trivial work (e.g. replacing struts or wheel bearings, that sort of stuff). This is of course not a problem if you live in a single family house and have plenty of space to store the necessary tools and to work on it, but if you go all in into the lifestyle of living in a condo downtown that's recommended by the author of the article above, this can turn into huge and expensive hassle.
Your side projects will never go to waste - you'll get to keep that learning and experience at the very least.

The only thing that needs attention paid to is have a flow of income while you're still working on your side project. It becomes mainstream as your only job when it starts bringing back decent money or VC support.

There's a reason they're "side" projects.
Beancount v3: Goals and Design
Seemed to me the neighbor was far too excited to not wake him up, haha.
Focusing in your employer/job was a good career move up until the 70's. Nowadays, you are being a fool if you dedicate 100% of yourself to your company. Your company doesn't want you, you are too expensive. You may think you are worth that money because you bring value to the company. Think again.

Apologies if I am being too blunt.
A centrifugal spin on a 500-year-old air compressor design
Must have been designed by a developer