skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion, this is ridiculous. The failure of this argument is here:

> Therefore, increasing your consumption of computing resources increases your contribution to the suffering of others.

Yes, this is technically true. I think there's an easy way to trump this:

The amount by which your extra compute cycles increase global warming is much less than both of (the opportunity cost of spending your time tweaking your code instead of some other method of fighting global warming) and (the amount that some single-digit percentage of your salary could contribute to fighting global warming).

At some point, you will be punished for prioritizing performance-tuning code over producing business value. If you use your dollars to fight against global warming in some way, this is a net negative. Likewise, if you do this off the clock, I believe there are other volunteer actions you could take that would decrease carbon emissions more than spending that time optimizing code.
GTK+ with Broadway
I was thinking the same thing... lack of capital is perhaps the main reason that people in poorly maintained suburbs aren't buying buildings to start bakeries and daycares, rather than a lack of initiative...
"Turkey baster" is a kitchen tool used to transfer small amounts of liquid. https://www.amazon.com/Norpro-5900-Nylon-Baster/dp/B000HEIUB...

Obviously it can have other non-kitchen uses (transferring semen).
I rescued two Mac SEs from a dumpster, have my original Mac Plus and have since added a few more vintage Mac's and every once in a while I will break them out and PhoneNet them together over Apple Talk.

Authors page here - a nice read: http://fatlion.com/nettrek/
That isn't how email confirmation works, because it's a) enormously prone to false negatives, b) subject to ruinous delays, c) occurring after the transaction i.e. too late, and d) building you a reputation as a bad sender.

This is why all email address confirmation today is asking you to click a link or enter a code.

Also note that the latter strategy is rising in popularity; it is because clickable links, whilst seeming so convenient, are themselves prone to both false positives and negatives, and also increase the likelihood of ending up in junk mail.
Be careful, the narrative that you need tons of hardware to do anything is pushed by companies selling licenses to cloud APIs and cloud training platforms. In reality people routinely publish new results at AI conferences while only having access to a few GPUs. Not everything is about hardware. There are thousands and thousands of AI papers. Not all of them are about scaling up some model like GPT-3.

Yes, there is a lot of hype, a lot of misuse of ML by people who don't understand it. Yes, in some cases it makes no sense to use a deep neural net if logistic regression (which is a single-layer NN) will work. This is generally the case when your features are already very processed, curated and meaningful as in your earthquake example. But you will never solve e.g. image or speech understanding with logistic regression.

Perception on high-dimensional, complex, messy real-world signals is where deep nets excel. And they have unparalleled performance there, they blow everything out of the water. It's hard to overemphasize this. The last decade has turned many applications from does-not-work into works. A zero-one transition. Not 10% better, but it was hopeless and now it is "quite nice". Still not divine perfection, but it's far from just being hype.

It can be hard for outsiders to appreciate this, but before 2010 or so, everything in computer vision was very fragile for real-world applicability. The algorithms only worked in one specific setting, like one particular assembly line, with all parameters hand tuned in the pipeline. You needed a lot of experience and intuition to configure your feature extraction pipeline and the regression method and it was still very fragile. Much of research was only demonstrated on toy examples, synthetic data, or only on a few images. The shift to huge datasets is also something from the last 10-15 years. Before that people cherry-picked example, where their hand-crafted algorithm with hand-tuned parameters finally produced something resembling an okay result. I'm only exaggerating a little. These things really didn't work. Many of the concepts were already in place, but it still didn't work.
You’re missing the point about the “taste” bit—the point isn’t that they’re doing it for the taste, but that they’re not doing it for the psychological effect. In your example, changes to taste are the psychological effect of weed. Again, this isn’t a moral argument, just observing a distinction.
Kim didn't break into anything and didn't steal anything. He made it easy to share information, that's it [if we're talking about Megaupload only].
And it misses you. Check out CSGO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkJu4laFGTs&t=5440
Depends on your point of reference and what you're using Rust for. The crate ecosystem is a huge breath of fresh air compared to package management in C and C++, but you can't expect it to have a very good solution for things like game engines and GUIs.
I will be soon releasing more details, but I kind of am trying to perfect this first.
Code is not the only element in the process generating GHG. The coder's way of life, the coder's tool, the resources needed should all be taken into account. What matters in the end is the global footprint of the code.

Writing quickly a very inefficient code that will run a handful of time is much better than spending 2 months full time optimizing it. And straightforward codes are also easier to debug. It may be a concept quite linked to Python, be premature optimization is where the crux of the problem is. Except we are now talking about an optimisation in processing power with an impact that is much wider, and thus with a more complex link.
One Hundred Rust Binaries
(Original author here)

Fight vs. flight. How do you decide? I'm just a bit older than you (36 currently) and haven't figured it out yet.

Like, if I think the politics somewhere are a dumpster fire, or to use your analogy, growing crops in a salted field, how do I pick the battles I'll fight, vs. the ones where it's best to let go?

Offhand, I tend to think it's worth fighting for when the thing is very important to you personally, it's something only you can do (whether by dint of identity, skills, whatever), or the benefits are large. Probably not worth it when you don't have the patience (might take ten years but you only want to put in 5), the other side is too entrenched, or the upside isn't worth it. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Yes, educating/training workers in a Global South country that has already been heavily underdeveloped, in order to get cheap labor -- what an original formula.

If you don't see something, answer me this: why don't they do anything like this in the US?
> I ran into some nationalistic issues (“this is a UK product”)

With the rest of the world defaulting to US-english locale in all kinds of settings, one might forgive the exception
You didn't understand my coal comment. No surprise, it is hard to explain. Efficiency gains mean you burn less coal. The old boilers in 1900 were very inefficient. It is not very hard to build a modern boiler that is much more efficient, and thus uses less fuel. The coal might worse, but China is using far less to get the same energy out of it which means less pollution.
I can understand the point that X Lang is easier to write a DSL parser/interpreter in than Y Lang for a bunch of reasons, including memory management (I've hit the recursion snags a few times writing parsers in Rust myself - I get it). So I don't want to denigrate their design decision.

Just the logic seemed out of nowhere to me, like this shouldn't be terribly surprising to a language developer, and it's framed like they're discovering things for the first time.
Money is used to buy propaganda, churches have millennia old propaganda infrastructure financed by murder and pillage, and are mostly extremely wealthy.
As others have noted, I share your pain and am in complete agreement that Dropbox has gone from a must-have utility that was a core part of several key workflows to a steaming crapfest of monetization and upsell. I dropped my subscription to Dropbox, migrated everything that was easy and convenient away, and have not looked back.

I feel bad, sort of, to need to part ways with a tool that was once so useful and clever. OTOH, good riddance!
If you watch an SPJ conference talk, this sort of language is par for the course. He's very energetic and occasionally hyperbolic, often using very engaging rhetoric to make his talks fun and catchy. I can 100% imagine him saying the quoted line out loud and it sounds just fine, but written in text without his emphasis makes it seem much more like an evangelist than he really is.
I think democracy is perfectly compatible with usurping power from those who wield it poorly. It would be great if the government solved these problems, but I don't think it's my place to tell someone to just sit there and take it when the government doesn't solve those problems.
https://observation.org/ has existed for a few years. It's been used for all kinds of observations ranging from plants to birds.
Sometimes you just write inefficient code because you don't know better, or because to improve efficiency you need to use a new workflow or framework which won't exactly pull or revolutionize what you're fixing/doing.

If it works, and everyone likes it, it isn't inefficient code. You just applied the best of time, resources and delivered what the end customer wanted.

--

What about something more dicey, like the incarceration of humans, or even eventually deciding which ones deserve more treatment, or not? Or regarding insurance policies that are dependent on legal geographic location of the customer and risk mitigation policy of the ORG that hired you to conserve overall lifetime cost per customer?
California passes Prop 22 in a major victory for Uber and Lyft
The issue, as I remember it, was that Megaupload consolidated files with the same hash that were uploaded by multiple people, so that they only kept one copy with multiple links pointing to it.

When they received a copyright notice, they would immediately remove only the link that was referenced in the notice, but would leave the file with all the other links still pointing to it. Which was the difference between "running a file-hosting service" and "knowingly hosting copyrighted material".
In other words, if your target has something other than 16/32/64 bit words, or lots of cool SIMD instructions, C has all of the fiddlyness of assembly, and an added impedance mismatch, but none of the performance.
> These findings:

Right - didn't I cover those? I gave the example that Graal is extremely powerful with a huge amount of money and effort behind it, but doesn't really bother at all with serious register allocation or clever instruction selection as suggested you should in text books. It uses the most basic algorithm and doesn't see any need to do any more, even when they're still keen on tiny improvements to the output. It just doesn't seem to be worth it.

But it does put a lot of effort into object allocation, boxing, inlining, specialisation, etc. So those seem in practice to be worth it.
With ubiquitous surveillance, you can build a database of the location activity of all citizens. This is problematic for several reasons, with top-of-mind right now being targeting individuals for political reasons, but also stuff like what if the database gets hacked, and general fourth- and fifth-amendment concerns.

With a ban in place, the ability to build such a database drops significantly because you need a pretense for every image or piece of video you acquire. You can acquire and send for processing security camera footage when there was a crime, but when there was no crime? How do you justify acquiring the security footage, and how do you justify asking for it to be processed. Whether the footage available to facial recognize is ubiquitous or not makes a qualitative impact.
Not actually the case. You are massively overestimating the impact of praxeology on Austrian economics. Austrian economics predates praxeology for 80 years.

The problem is that you are not actual arguing against austrian economics but a political movement that has hijacked the ideas and presents itself as 'the solution' that proves their political view. This is mostly driven by some conservative finance and the 'The Mises institute', that should actually be called 'The Rothbart Institute'. As they don't really represent Austrian economics as a whole, but rather a narrow minded interpretation of Mises.

If you look at the Austrians generally and those still in academia, they do not actually work that way, and they don't reject empiricism as a whole. The reject pure empiricism and pure positivism, in favor of a individual and institutional approach that is validated by data. In practice and historically Austrian economics was much closer to what we today would consider institutional economics, Law&Economics and Political Economics.

I have years ago stopped fighting since the term has been so discredited by the mob of morons on the internet. Some economists that solidly work within Austrian tradition have stopped using that term because of those bad associations.

But I'm just telling you, your argument really is just like arguing against some Burnie fam who proclaims Keynsian economics implies socialism.
When I went from being an evangelical christian studying theology to an atheist a whole world of conversations opened up to me. I could suddenly talk to people of almost any faith about their religion which had been hard before. But only as long as they held their faith kind of loosely as a cultural or philosophical mantle.

But I could no longer have the same kind of conversations that I used to with my old theology friends who were all still Biblical literalists. Not that every conversation devoloved into argument nor that I was even particularly insistent on my new view. But after some amount of talking we'd hit a disagreement and quickly find the root of that disagreement was some basic belief we held about the universe. Something as atheological as why people are philanderers comes down to whether you believe in evolution via natural selection or original sin.

And that is where America is politically today. There are fundamental facts and values we disagree about. I find writing like this to be incredibly patronizing. As if people aren't already having polite discussions about politics. As if people are voting and do not know what they are for and against. The funny part too is that we are at a point where that is least true. Voter's knowledge of their party's policies is at an all time high.

It's hard to accept that we just fundamentally disagree. But that is the fact. Eventually, one side is going to win or we'll remain deadlocked and muddle on with some hybrid policies from both sides. But the polite conversation over the pot roast isn't going to convince Nana that fetuses don't have souls. That's not a simple difference of opinion it's a difference of faith.
I think about this question a lot, less because of wasting energy though, and more because of wasting user's time, or battery life, or even wasting your own profits should your product start getting more load than you anticipated!

For people who are created product for an end user, being far off from optimal efficiency is very excusable. You have deadlines to hit, you can't afford to iterate forever on the thing, users won't like that either, their want their stuff.

But as your software moves further down the stack to being a more fundamental tool: a library, a compiler, and operating system, a database, things that other software will depend on, those things I think deserve way more attention on performance. And of course they generally DO get way more attention. There are some glaring exceptions though, such as the huge degree of inefficiency that popular, interpreted (or badly jitted) languages have. None of that is strictly necessary. Languages could exist with the same productivity as those (maybe more!) with good runtime performance. Another example would be our industry's dependence on using a web browser to build multi-platform guis. We could fix that, and create more efficient, easier to use things. The effort level is very high but the payoff very big.

I think looking for those popular, inefficient, software building blocks, and improving them, or replacing them, is the fastest way towards positive change.

Another easy leverage point we have is to quit discouraging curious programmers from thinking about performance. I see it all the time here, on reddit, on stack overflow. Using the Knuth quote to discourage performance investigation and curiosity. Let people learn! The cost of writing fast code goes down with practice.
Hi, here is Romaric, CEO of Qovery - Thanks for your feedback. UI is live.... in a few minutes for the first time :)
Weakly-supervised and self-supervised methods are extremely mainstream today. There is a flood of papers on these topics. Conferences are full of them.
This comment was perhaps insightful 5-6 years ago, today it's absolute orthodoxy.
The thing is though, supervised just works way better. It's not that people don't want to do weakly-supervised, but that it's very hard!
Sometimes, until you can't, then you have a really bad time.

For instance:

- You shouldn't rely on finalizers to manage resources due to the lack of determinism. No compiler support to help you through that.

- Similarly, when the magic blob GC starts acting up, how do you solve that?

- What about memory usage being orders of magnitude higher in a GC'd system?

It's just different problems. To an extent the line where you have to care is much closer in Rust than Java, but in Java, when you cross the line, good luck. Rust forcing you to be expressive from the get-go pays dividends down the line, allowing you to be relatively more productive, later.

I guess it's like skiing vs. snowboarding. Skiing is easy to get going, but really difficult to get good at. Snowboarding is really hard to get started, but once you do, it's relatively much easier to be great at it.
Yes, LLVM is huge, but there are a couple of interesting alternatives such as sljit, see e.g. https://github.com/wdv4758h/awesome-jit

Even LuaJIT can be used as a backend for other languages than Lua, see e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon/.
Market capitalization of the largest U.S. internet companies as of June 2020
It uses virtualization to run most/all Linux tools, I'm not quite sure if the functionality is bridged between the UI in Fuchsia yet, but the end product will likely end up looking something look Crostini on Chrome OS.
I don't feel sorry at all for Microsoft. They have a long history of harassing developers (e.g., [1]. It's nice to see them bear some of that for once.

1. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2676459/microsoft-sues-lin...
‘90 Day Finn’ Program Invites U.S. Tech Professionals to Experience Finland
I’m guessing Dark is interpreted and that its objects are managed by the host language’s GC?
I can feel the incredible arrogance of this post from here. "I, who came from the source of half the problems we're in, am smarter and better because I am from the Valley. I will fix everywhere else's problems because I am optimistic about it!"
> If it's GC'd, how is that implemented?

The language in which the Dark interpreter is built has a GC, and we just use that.

A GC is a huge undertaking, and we already have to build an editor, a language, a stdlib, and infrastructure.
Same here I have been using Sync.com for at least 2 years. paid subscription. No issues. It is nice to think that the Admins can't see my files... unlike dropbox.
Go doesn't even have try-catch. In high level languages you can just write huge amount of code in a try-catch block that runs in a single transaction and if something goes bad, the entire transaction will be rolled back (without writing a single line of code for this to happen). In Go you have to handle return codes after each operation and that is 100x more code. I don't have time for such micro-optimizations.
Should be fixed now, we had a little hiccup with the the translation system that caused it to crash on launch.
Disinformation via Shortwave (Am) Radio
I say -- bingo
Immigration to a new country is a whole lot more onerous than just moving to a different state.

If I used hard drugs, I 100% would consider moving to a different state if it meant avoiding jailtime and a record.
Do you have an explanation of any of the details?
Short answer is that they pay a lot.
When running a BBS the first thing you learned was how to add the codes to disable call waiting to your modem INIT string.

Ah, the good 'ol days. I picked up a cheap fax switch so I could share my dorm line with my BBS. Very cheesy british lady answered the phone "This is the Fax Boss answering your call. To send a fax remain silent, otherwise press 2 to connect" or something like that. I only really remember up to "...to send a fax...". Wish I still had that thing, it was awesome at the time. Of course instead of faxes I was receiving BBS callers but it worked perfectly. Confused my parents constantly.
> Breathing also produces greenhouse gasses. :( Considering only the costs without the benefits is not a workable approach to moral analysis

But then one needs to consider whether being alive is indeed a net positive (as opposed to just selfish self preservation). Then the question becomes much deeper in terms not only of whether writing code is efficient, but also a question of life choices in general, with regards to the utility the individual brings to the world as well as whether said utility advances moral goals (as opposed to e.g. growing a human economy in some unsustainable way).

Going down the rabbit hole really illustrates the hypocrisy of this line of reasoning: what of the immorality of some small task when one can be judgmental of virtually everything in the same way to such an extent that civilized society as a whole might be considered immoral if put under the same level of scrutiny.
> Thanks for “educating” myself, a Chinese, about how a story goes by Chinese.

You welcome? I mean, its not like you can't find plenty of documentation on this if you are Chinese, it was only invented in the 19th century, its not like it was invented during the Qin dynasty where documentation is hard to come by and largely via folk tails.
more context: https://nitter.net/Bing_Chris/status/1324001155291205633#m
Well, he did also say:

> Don’t be obnoxious. Listen as much as you talk. Don’t be a blowhard.
This is white-savior level condescension, which is fitting since Homewood has been trending towards majority-minority demographics for a few decades and may get there this census.
Harming the industry is not a problem for shareholders. They can sell their shares and buy ones in another industry.
Dunno about their main product (never used it much), but Paper is awesome! Dark mode UI implemented super well!
This quote from your reference gives the answer: We also considered using dynasm, but found the tooling that comes with asmjit to be better.

EDIT: But it still gives no answer why they preferred asmjit in favour of other solutions than LLVM or DynASM (where the latter is just an assembler which helps to integrate with C code, not a platform abstraction like LLVM or others).
more garbage that mentions benefits while ignoring that costs even exist.

if you want to consider the environment in your engineering decisions, that's fine, just bring it up front and put it in there with the NRE vs operational costs, etc.

probably more cost effective to just do whatever engineering you were going to do anyways and then send the money that it would cost to write "efficient" code to some tree planting charity.

they'd get the money up front, and you could start profiting X months sooner.
Pig farming is vastly different than fur farming around here.

Besides, pigs have been domesticat for a lot longer than foxes and minks.