skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like I might be in this predicament in that I am very comfortable at my company.

I think part of my issue is that I am not certain what are definitive ways to add more value to my company. In the last year, I had contributed in ways that had tangible benefits to my teammates; however, I'm not certain of how to repeat these sort of feats.

The feedback from my manager is that I'm doing well, I get along with my team, and everyone seems to pull in the same direction without ego.

What should I do? Do I coast and hope for finding the work that needs to be done? Or do I look somewhere else? There's a lot of areas where I can learn new things at my current company, but I don't know where to start or what direction to head towards.
Oh, it's just a Markdown to HTML translator.

I expected it to write the blog, with GPT-3.
On the subject of the effectiveness of lockdowns I would suggest taking some time to read this well researched, cited, and sourced article about China's influence with regard to lockdowns and Covid 19

China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid...

A couple quotes from the middle of the article:

> In March, Chinese state media began describing the strategy of “herd immunity”—allowing the coronavirus to spread among the young and healthy—as a violation of “human rights,” an Orwellian formulation given that lockdowns are essentially a blanket suspension of rights.

> Initially, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also opted for herd immunity. But on March 13, suspicious accounts began storming his Twitter feed and likening his plan to genocide. This language almost never appears in Johnson’s feed before March 12, and several of the accounts were hardly active before then. Britain locked down on March 23.
Since RISC wasn't coined by IBM (but by Patterson and Ditzel) this is just plain nonsense. RISC was and is a philosophy that's basically about not adding transistors or complexity that doesn't help performance and accepting that we have to move some of that complexity to software instead.

Why wasn't it obvious previously? A few things had to happen: compilers had to evolve to be sophisticated enough, mindsets had to adapt to trusting these tools to do a good enough job (I actually know several who in the 80' still insisted on assembler on the 390), and finally, VLSI had to evolve to the point where you could fit an entire RISC on a die. The last bit was a quantum leap as you couldn't do this with a "CISC" and the penalty for going off-chip was significant (and has only grown).
> Also, you are not failing to pay so it doesn't affect your credit. No consequences.

Yes not a failing to pay... but doesn't your credit report suddenly show £100k against your name? And they'll assume the car's deprecated so you'll be underwater. That's not as bad as failing to pay but I wouldn't want to be applying for a mortgage the next month.
I just got my Thinkpad T14 (Ryzen 7 8c/16T, 48 GB memory), I looked at the XPS with Tigerlake, but even if the screen is better, I'm getting more computer for the same price with the T14.
There is no "economic" reason somebody needs to die of hunger. We may choose not to give food to hungry people, and we might choose to not pivot to food production.
That's exactly what they do. Buy when it's good, extract as much money as they can and then sell it on or run it into the ground.
Note, though: circulating cold & flu viruses serve to "boost" prior immunity via new mild/asymptomatic cases each year. Without these, immunities are decaying.

So it's possible that when more normal interchange with the rest of the world resumes, NZ (and others) will have some "very bad" traditional cold/flu seasons. (It may feel like Covid, but not be.)
> The US efforts in that regard are ineffectual so the half-assed lockdown and mask wearing will need continue indefinitely until there is a vaccine, which is the only hope left.

- The US received 100,000 airline passengers per week from Wuhan and Shanghai, and pax kept arriving after the travel ban via Africa and Canada afterwards

- the CDC initially provided non-working test kits for weeks

- the CDC and China should have started work on the vaccine after SARS-1 in 2003

- the US has 50 states and thus decentralized mgmt.

- the only hope for the US is herd immunity, so hug a stranger today!
$300 would rent you a Corolla for a week, not a Tesla. A quick check shows that would be closer $1500 for a week.
what is exciting about Tiger Lake IMO is the memory tagging feature (ARM has it already) which can mitigate ROP attacks. It was announced here:

https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2020/...

memory tagging is like a hardware based ASAN that eliminates many memory bugs and improves memory debugging. So its potential is well beyond mitigating ROP (though all these benchmarks will change with memory tagging enabled :-))).

Intel patent document "US2020/0125502 Low memory overhead heap management for memory tagging", has more info on how this might work: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20200125502.pdf

For a great background primer on why to use this see the brilliant work of Konstantin Serebryany https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1802/1802.09517.pdf

IMO this is long overdue on Intel architecture and the main reason why one might want to be excited about Tiger Lake

I can imagine it will lead to a lot of effort for Linux: malloc implementation, glibc, compilers, toolchains and debugging tools ... and lots of discussions about why and when it should be enabled. (IMO you want this in production always)
Dell Latitudes are built more solidly.
Bad bot.
Rackspace has been around forever but they are a bunch of children working out of an abandoned mall like its Day of the Dead (which they've decorated like a discount Facebook HQ). They hire a few well known OpenSource people but its clown-town the rest of the way down. This is mostly because they are stingy and risk averse. Exhibit A: Who headquarters in San Antonio? Maybe once IBM or HP hit their heads a few more times one of them will buy up Rackspace and be done with it.
I understand WG is meant to be no frills but for my company to use it, we need a standardized authentication framework around it like Xauth that can handle usernames/passwords/certificates (X509, not just keys)/MFA/etc. and server side tracking to allow for termination of sessions when people leave. It's not something I want to build myself. I would prefer that it be standardized and added to the official clients. Even if it's as simple as an OAuth flow that returns a key.
Data is one issue but what about the approach and methods used
It worked in Czech Republic, hell we even opened our borders up back in June and the measures that were in place kept things broadly manageable (note: we're not even an island, we're smack bang in the middle of Central Europe). What sank us was that the government capitulated, patted themselves on the back for a job well done and removed the requirement for masks on public transport, in shops, in offices etc. In the last week they've since had to clamp down severely and it's going to tank the economy where I live. I'm not going to pretend it was rosy under the restrictions, many businesses were hurting but weren't completely crippled, but many had found a way to survive. And we've since gone from being the envy of continental Europe to having some of the highest per-capita new cases per day in the world.

I'm not sure what else you can do other than try to keep things under control while a potential vaccine or at least treatment is developed. Give up and just let it spread through the population, whoever lives wins?
likewise. I need an invite as well.
Why is the US Election day marked on the graph? Is it saying "Lots of Covid deaths, also US Election wink wink"?
I work with these lasers every day. This seems to be a decent write-up: [1].

[1] https://www.rp-photonics.com/eye_safe_lasers.html
Problem with English is that there are a lot of vowels (up to about 20) and the number varies greatly based on dialect. I believe this is an outlier for Indo-European languages.
That wasn't reasonable discussion. It was snark and flamebait, which broke several of the site guidelines, so the users who flagged it were correct.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? We'd appreciate it. Note this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Edit: you've unfortunately been posting in the flamewar style a lot. We're trying for something different than that here, which gets destroyed when people go into flame mode, so if you could please take the guidelines and the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The fact that there's little evidence is itself the problem. Facebook is manipulating the reach of some news sources over others but their methodology is completely opaque. The choices about how the news feed works can't be entirely free of a subjective understanding of how the world works so the question isn't "is the new feed biased?", it's "how is it biased?". Without transparency, speculating is the only route we have to ask that question.

At this point we know that Facebook has the potential to significantly influence political discourse with the choices it makes. The fact that those choices are hidden is a problem but a bigger problem is the influence itself. No privately held company should ever be allowed this level of (potential/actual) influence on political discourse.
Oh come now, we can exercise and advocate for caution and good sense without pretending that this virus is more dangerous than polio or measles or the 1918 flu or any of the markedly more severe viruses.
While in theory true, in practice borders are not 100% effective. Locking the doors encourages people to climb through the windows, even islands can be entered by boat.

Opening the borders with a strict two week quarantine enforcement seems like the only sane way to proceed (as NZ has done)
My experience is total opposite. I had horrible hardware experience with MacBook Pro. Battery being blown up, broken hinges, keyboard skipping... My XPS has been working amazingly fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What advice do you have for people to kick this bad habit? I struggle with keeping focus on work because it’s generally not that interesting. Switching teams within the company is a non-option because there’s a high risk other teams are toxic and WLB would be terrible. Switching other companies is a problem due to the leetcode-ification of interviews I know I couldn’t pass currently.
It's unfortunate, that comments like one above gets downvoting into abyss completely damaging the author karma.

This is a perfectly valid and reasonable comment.

The whole upvoting/downvoting system in HN sometimes works just for silencing the minority opinions which is quite dangerous.
For extra deaths of cancer?
And a very big island just next door, not quite as authoritative but doing almost as well in the pandemic, Australia, has just opened its doors to New Zealanders. I think we are doing quite well down under thanks to good government and a community that seems to think other lives are as important as our own.
One reason to drag it out is so that you don't overwhelm the healthcare system.
I am slow to customize vim for some abstract notion of "my use". On the other hand, I am quick to customize vim for specific projects.
I'm kind of surprised that being an island would help, actually. Is international travel into prosperous islands really less than into equally prosperous contintental countries? Most long-distance travel is by air anyway.
Total destruction? What are you referring to?
And then some countries will die because they are majorly dependent to international travel and tourism. Not every country in the world is self-sustainable. Closed borders are an easy strategy, but cannot be applied everywhere in the world. Take a look in EU which is built under the open-borders strategy, take a look at any country which economies depend heavily on tourism, and so on.

I wish every country was like NZ where we could apply such measures, but we aren't. In example, my country Greece with closed border would face a more extreme economic crisis than 10 years ago.
You're projecting Iceland onto NZ just because they're relatively remote island nations. Iceland is very European in its skeptical and resentful response to the low-tech response to covid: masking, washing hands, social distancing. That's why when people have brought covid over it has spread through society like it has. People in NZ by the sounds of it are acting much more like ppl in SE/E Asia, adopting the low tech WHO strategy. That's why things are as they are in NZ, and why Iceland keeps suffering from outbreaks. And it's why your analogy of Iceland and NZ is a false one.
Can you name another communicable disease where "herd immunity through natural propagation" is the recommended treatment?

Even relatively less dangerous viruses, like influenza, have strong vaccination programs, and relatively more dangerous viruses (measles, mumps, smallpox, etc.) are only words I know because of the vaccines I got as a child. I can't think of a disease with a nontrivial mortality rate that we don't aggressively vaccinate and have public health measures to prevent. Can you?
Don't we have evidence of reinfection?
Why Does Everybody Hate Their Parents?
Understanding of the statistical methods and machine learning models is imperative to have but why for example IBM’s Watson for Oncology Project Cancelled After Spending $62 Million. Wasn't they had proper skill set and data?
Anecdote: in 6 months I can and have surpassed team members that have been with the team for 6 years. These are bespoke complex systems, but some people don’t advance much (“work to live”?) and I’m a quick learner, partly due to job hopping.
I really don't understand why such an in depth benchmark does not test thermal throttling. This would be much more interesting to me. I disable turbo boost and undervolt my CPU on every laptop because it really drives me nuts that when I'm compiling something suddenly I can't use my web browser because my CPU has clocked to 800 Mhz. I rather have a little longer compilation time and ensure my PC is still usable in that time.
At $160 it's quite a lot to ask...
Personally, I find his prose to be plain and boring but, his insight is really interesting.

"Now we would like to go a step further and extend the system to handle differenti­ation. This is a favorite problem, and one which has historical significance: in the summer of 1958 John McCarthy decided to investigate differentiation as an interest­ing symbolic computation problem, which was difficult to express in the primitive programming languages of the day. This investigation led him to see the importance of functional arguments and recursive functions in the field of symbolic computa­tion. For example, McCarthy invented what we now call mapcar to express the idea that the derivative of a sum is the sum of the derivative function applied to each argument. Further work led McCarthy to the publication in October 1958 of MIT AI Lab Memo No. 1: "An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions," which defined the precursor of Lisp."

PAIP is filled with writing like this. You could remove this paragraph from the book and, it wouldn't make the explanation any more or less comprehensible. The level of detail at which he provides this insight is interesting. It ends up being more than just amusing anecdotes. It's what makes the book worth reading imo.
I totally agree. Sorry, I did preface it "As unethical as it sounds".

Your comment seems to be "cancelling" mine purely on emotional basis despite of prefacing my intentions. God forbid, if I had purely stated it with no warnings.

I agree, it is pretty shitty to thing to say that older people are not as valuable to the society as the young. There is objectivity and truth to it, although it might be unpleasant. I am afraid that this is what's going on in the world today - objectivity takes a backseat, emotional and knee-jerk "cancel" culture prevails. It deeply bothers me.
> Under 48 there basically similar chance of dying as the flu.

Numbers? Or maybe "basically similar" means "an order of magnitude larger".
Survivors of an International Buddhist Cult Share Their Stories
Wasn’t this what all of the “flatten the curve” messaging was about in March? Yes. The reason to slow things down is to avoid overwhelming the health care system.
It's also the case that "the economy" is what's paying for all our advanced healthcare that is saving lives and enabling people to live longer, healthier, happier lives. Recessions destroy lives as well, everything is a trade-off, a balance.

And people were clearly happy to make this trade-off every single day pre-corona. We don't lower the speed limit to 30mph, even though that would almost eliminate every single traffic accident. We don't ban certain pesticides that are really bad for the environment, because they work really well and increase the yield. We allow dangerous jobs where people can be maimed or killed, because someone needs to do it. We allow people to go parachuting, we allow smoking, unhealthy food, we allow people to own and use guns, even though all of these things let people injure and kill themselves and others.

Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessment, we undervalue known risks and overvalue unknown risks, and that's clearly what's going on with the lockdown hysteria, because the response is so clearly disproportional compared to how we're handling similar threats with similar risk profiles.
Esperanto is much easier to learn, provided you already know latin or Cyrillic alphabet.
It's a bit different scanning a teapot to scanning a human - it may be the case that the built-in ability for humans to self-repair could carry the day, even granting that generation loss is an unavoidable thing for teleporters. Interesting artwork though!
It seems very unlikely that there can be vaccine that is effective long term. Just as there is no long term Flu vaccine.
This fails when you want `4 + c` or `c + 4.f` etc. So you either have a gross number of overloads doing the same thing, or you just put an implicit constructor to `complex`.

Also, I agree that implicit conversions in general should be avoided, but this complex number example feels like the perfect use case.
Technically the act of requesting and obtaining a loan would involve a hard inquiry on your credit report. [0]

It isn't a huge ding and only lasts for about 2 years (and trails off in impact over that time period), but if you did so repeatedly, that would be a negative signal to future lenders.

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education...
I applaud your idea, but it won't work. There are already checks and balances. The president is not a dictator.

Congress is one of them. Both chambers are elected separately and provide a counterweight to a freewheeling president. Unless they also freewheel of course.

The Surpreme Court is another one. Supposedly very educated, almost "wise" people sit there to stop things that go wrong if president AND congress go too far.

You are proposing another instance that can stop bad things from happening if ALL of the above fail. If the majority in congress joins the president with nonsense. Both Chambers. AND the Surpeme Court too. All of those have to fail for your proposal to kick in and make sense.

And you know what? If that happens, it's too late. If all the above fail, your Science Council will just be sucked into the same politicized dark alley that the other branches are in. Why? Becaude they don't exist in a vacuum. No matter how they are appointed, by election, by lifetime appointment, whatever process, once they have real power, this process can be corrupted just as much as for the other branches. You see it right now happening with the Supreme Court. People on the Science Council will live in the real world, they are not infinitely wise (wo)men falling from the sky. They need to be picked and agreed upon. If that process fails for congress AND presideny AND the Supreme Court, then it's going to fail here too.

And worse, it can be counter productive. As long as the scientific community is as "independent" as it is today, a global community not answering to a single country, it can't be easily corrupted by one countries gov going crazy. The moment you install an official council with actual power, it can and will be. Now you'll have an official body where by some corrupted process the participants will officially denounce climate change science or covid or whatever, and now your assumed corrupt regime can point at it and use it in their favor.

In summary, good idea at first sight, but unworkable when zooming in.
This is trivially disproven by the excess mortality figures from earlier in the year.

By the start of the Summer the UK had around 60,000 excess deaths above the five year median - which included at least one fairly severe flu season.

Later in the Summer when lockdown was still in place and/or infection rates were still very controlled, the number of excess deaths dipped slightly below the median - as you would expect it to, given that people weren't commuting and there were far fewer road accidents.

The figures also disprove the usual talking point that other deaths had increased dramatically because hospital care and chronic medical attention were hard to access. There were certainly some extra deaths, but not on the scale of COVID itself.

Unless you're going to claim that some other lethal illness was stalking the land and no one had noticed, COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths.
What is with variable-length instruction aversion? Why is it better to load a 32-bit immediate with two 4-byte instructions (oh, and splitting it in 12/20 bit parts is non-intuitive because of sign extension, thanks RISC V authors) than with one 5-byte instuction?
I was quite amused early on when people were talking about how brave truck drivers were for risking a COVID-19 infection. The per-year-worked fatal injury rate for truck drivers(1) is 0.024%. Meanwhile, a COVID-19 infection for the 20-49 age group has just a 0.02% fatality rate. Logging is even worse, at 0.14%/year-worked.

More than just risk adverse, I think a lot of people don't understand how risky life in general is.

edit: ...and I'll point out, those truck drivers may still have been brave! If you mistakenly think the risk is higher than it actually is, you're still brave for taking it on.

1) https://www.trucks.com/2017/12/26/trucking-deadliest-jobs/
Thanks for all your comments in this thread. I looked at your profile to try and find an email address to say this personally but I figure it's good to say this in public too. You're writing all the things I would if I had a bit more time and inclination. I know it takes a good chunk of time and courage and mindspace to go against the current like you are, but just know there are a lot of people reading comments like yours and nodding their head but just don't want to join the fray. There are also a lot of people waking up from the virus fear only to confront the way scarier danger of the agendas driving things. Your comments are helpful to them too. Anyway keep it up!
What's the point in verbalizing your laser flyswatter idea to chefs, when even most engineers wouldn't be able to build one?
Show HN: Elo ratings power underground music discovery
Be careful using the title "engineer", depending on where you work. Here in Canada it is illegal to use the title unless you are registered with the provincial engineering order, and they will charge you $.
I believe reservoirs refer to animals that can also carry the cold or virus but are not affected by government measures
Why a Perfect Spiral Football Pass Doesn’t Break the Laws of Physics
New Zealander here: Why would we need to give up? We can come and go from New Zealand (with an isolation period) and life is normal once you are inside. Non-residents can’t come without some big hurdles though.