skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you decide what books to read?
Prompted by today’s post about Bill Gates’ “Good books for a lousy year” I’m curious how you decide to read next.

I happen to read a lot (129 books last year, 121 so far this year) and widely, but I’m wondering if I could be directing my reading better. I tend to read in certain threads for a while (I read a lot about the atomic bomb and Cold War this year, for example) but also tend to get interested in popular or award winning books, whether contemporary or not. I also read a lot of fiction, where my choices tend to be even more random than my non-fiction choices. Or I get interested in one author and read everything they’ve written.

My method isn’t necessarily bad but I’m thinking it might be time to optimize my reading a bit.

So HN: How do you decide what to read?
> Suppose you want to visit every state capitol exactly once, traveling on highways. Which route is shortest? Which route is longest? What is the mean and standard deviation of all the routes?

So these “BDDs” allow for “efficient” solutions to the traveling salesman problem? Call me a skeptic, but I’m skeptical...
> No-one ever defends themselves by saying "everything I did was enabled by the poorly designed system, therefore I am not a criminal".

This is a pretty common argument, actually, when it comes to questions of "allowed" API access.
You are attributing to malice what can be easily explained by bad processes and incompetence (we see this all the time in tech with bugs that make it through to production!).

The missing votes weren't much, and changed the nature of the race by less than 500 votes. Trump still lost Georgia by about 13,000.

The banana republic part of this is a man who lost the election by more than 7 million votes trying to steal the election. Trump didn't come close to winning. Trump got straight up thumped, and he is still trying to sue to get millions of votes thrown out. Millions of American votes.

If you are concerned with why voting isn't smoother in this country with less errors, you need to support creating national standards and funding to help make voting easier and more modern. This is an artifact of an incredibly balkanized voting processes. A lot of Americans would support easy, modern, universal voting.

The election is long since past, and Trump lost. The reason you don't see national news orgs covering small-scale election issues in individual counties is that they aren't national news stories. It's really that simple.

The fact that a recount found additional votes -- the point of a recount -- and that the additional votes didn't impact the election is not news. It's just not news.
And someone smart with different values and views might not think Bill Gates is that smart.
Yes thanks for mentioning this, the comments to this post are unusual even for HN. I'm wondering if there are so many comments that they are not actually sorted by most upvotes correctly
This test of lossless convexification showed good results with the stochastic control problem, but the fluid dynamics model could use some work before:

> Mars, here we come!!
20 years! Frankly hadn't thought of going back even further. But I guess if Lindy holds true, the farther you go back, the better it should get. In such a case having options to filter would be helpful, as other commenter suggested.
Yes, "left unattended"/"taken" are the same thing here.
> With a single binary, containers get even slimmer.

Not really. I agree on the other benefits of binaries but our containers usually only have the final layer change (the source code). This means that all the lower layers, python base image, requirements, etc are cached. So we can ship 100 times and add maybe 100mb of new container overhead. Binaries will ship 100% every time.
The exchanges tend to "go down for maintenance" on any big price swing.
I honestly think that this story (from the title) is just a clickbait. Ofcourse you need a central server to share the keys and you need to trust that central server. How do you make sure WhatsApp hasn't changed the keys in middle - there is a scan QR functionality. I honestly don't know how these articles still remain active on websites even after proven wrong and obviously clickbaity
Agreed 100%.

YouTube’s massively outsized impact is obviously the problem here. This wouldn’t be Orwellian if they didn’t have so much power. We wouldn’t need it if YouTube didn’t allow for such insane manipulation of people.

But if we’re going to have YouTube, by god do I prefer people NOT proliferating this madness freely.
Here's a link to the map https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/

This tweet highlights some of the insaneness: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192

Someone pays $806 per year, living next to someone who pays $27,732 per year.
Definitely, I do wonder how it compares in binary size. Especially the 'baseline' size of a hello world.
>If anything we should have even more competition so that we can actually see some progress instead of the regulatory gridlock and decaying infrastructure that exists.

Then how does competition address decaying infrastructure if not by running new lines?
The link mentions adversarial interoperability for ad blockers, which made me really remember how bad the ad landscape used to be. Crazy amounts of popups, ads that crashed your browser, the explorer shell, or the whole computer, seemingly recursive popups that you had to force-quit the browser to get out of... Sure, I still use an ad blocker, but it seems like have been forced to realize that if they want any of the advertising pie, they need to meet a minimal standard of playing nice with the user.
> You have surrendered your natural right to steal or to commit murder--rights that you would possess devoid of a system of governance.

You don't possess the right to steal or murder, regardless of the existence or lack of a government.

> These liberties you and others have sacrificed are exchanged for common security and self-preservation.

I didn't "sacrifice" my "right" to murder someone because I never had such a right.

> You are forced to abide by these restrictions because of the social contract between yourself and the government which creates and enforces these laws.

People aren't forced to abide by these restrictions, they are punished for violating them. And they are punished because law enforcement has an interest in enforcing them, not because of any social fiction.
The issue is that the media is selectively ignoring things like this in order to push the narrative that “there is no fraud”. Now it might be true that there isn’t enough fraud to change the apparent results. But as you pointed out, what is wrong with making sure they system works? The media should not try to sweep anything that threatens their agenda under the rug.
Visiting friends = Skype/Zoom/Teams/etc != YouTube

Gathering in a public space = Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon/etc != YouTube

Broadcasting = YouTube

And your last sentence about leftists/right-wingers and double-standards is demonstrably false. There have been just as many protests by pro-Trump/anti-lockdown/stop-the-steal groups as there have about BLM/count-the-votes protests. Both have attracted varying levels of police action (BLM the most by my assessment), and both have had various levels of pro/anti discussion/criticism in the media (depending on which you read). On the last point, freedom of assembly does not equal freedom from criticism.

EDITED: to fix formatting.
WhatsApp is a social network because it has stories.
“Flash of unstyled base class”
1. When this gets too extreme people start to ignore whether it is fair, logical or right, and respond with rage. People who have to close down, or feel poor, while they see a small group get crazy rich don’t care about economic theory, they just feel that something is wrong. Politicians use that rage to get elected and ‘fight for the people’, often implementing harmful policies to please angry crowds.

2. Australia has minimized this problem pretty well by having a pretty unregulated economy but a robust safety net.
Do they? As far as I know, Go is the only mainstream language that supports static binaries with normal non-trivial programs. Rust for example depends on dynamically linked libc if you use the standard library. While you technically can statically link libc, it is unsafe with glibc.
A man was lynched in east Texas by dragging him behind a truck, that was in the news in our lifetime (in 1998.) I was surprised they prosecuted the killers because prior to this, no white person even went to prison in Texas for killing a black person post reconstruction.
One awesome thing about DoorDash is their Delivery-as-a-Service API. It's application only, unlike Postmates, but I'm super excited DaaS in general and what it means for the future of logistics.

Shameless plug: I've developed an on-demand delivery app called getcho [1] (for anything, not just food) and am in the process of adding their fleet!

[1] https://getcho.app
That's all accurate to my experience.
So, out of all these big tech companies, Facebook is the monopoly?

Not Google with search? Not Apple with their App Store?

Facebook, a company whose products you could completely ignore and not even notice you're missing anything?
Just look up any of the other footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBELXjq_X-M
I wish I was smart enough to understand anything being said here.
A really interesting point.

However, there's no guarantee that letting them "go their own way" would have actually resulted in a better outcome. People in abusive relationships often bounce from one abusive relationship to another, not to mention the potential trauma of a break up.

It's hard for outsiders who have no insight in to the relationship to judge its worth. Yeah, maybe this couple you speak of is homeless, but that doesn't mean they're not happy. Not everything is about money, financial or material security. And maybe there are things about their relationship that make it all worth while. It's impossible to guess, given so little information, and I'd hesitate on judging.

Also, the same argument you use against intervention with MDMA therapy could be used against any intervention of any kind.

Using the same argument you could argue that maybe it's better for a doctor to let an injured person die, because, well, maybe they're a bad person and the world would be better off without them.

A doctor in an ER doesn't really know the person they're treating, but they generally try to help anyway. Could such help wind up causing more problems? Sure. But we as a society have generally decided that help for those in need, even if we don't know who they are and even if we can't foresee the ultimate consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
>The time to raise objections would have been before the

>election.

Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court. The lawsuits were rejected at the time, on the basis on not being able to prove injury/damage, because no damage has occurred yet, only hypothetically.

Now that the damage has occurred, they are told that they should have sued before.

Thats a very sneaky/dishonest way of being treated by the courts.

The fact check does not prove a lie. At most it proves that Trump is not making the statement based on publicly available data. Since the final rejection rate for 2020 have not yet been released.

From the fact check:

"Georgia rejected 6.42% of mail-in ballots in total in the 2016 general election "

"The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available."
I mean if you even tried to use logic you could understand why there would be drastically less rejected mail in ballots then normal years. There were massive information campaigns about how to correctly fill out ballots and the things to be careful of leading up to this election because millions of people were going to be voting by mail this year. In previous years there is 0 information about it at all. Also most people learned about the mistakes when their ballots got rejected in the primary.
You may be right but Starship uses Raptor engines, not Merlins.
PrimeVideo.com is the website (in addition to apps on mobile and living room devices like TVs and consoles) where customers outside of the US, UK, Germany, and Japan can watch Prime Video. In the aforementioned four countries, customers can watch Prime Video directly on their amazon.* retail website instead.
Next challenge: Write a regexp to check whether the post was written by an African-American or not, so you know whether to censor the n-word.
The best answer, but someone that "understand" why communism is bad might still be wrong (and by consequence, not been that smart, just tricked one level deeper)
> Heavier bullet = more momentum = more recoil.

But if you have the same amount of powder (chemical energy) a heavier bullet will simply move slower, resulting in the same momentum and recoil.

What makes the AR-15 easier to handle is that the gun itself is heavier, so it moves slower from the recoil. That and a few other things like dissipating the energy over a large area on your shoulder instead of the palm of your hand.
Do you think Germany lost their fucking minds when they outlawed Holocaust denialism?

You have full access to facts here. Nothing is being truly hidden. Hell, all of these videos can still be shared a million other ways. It’s insane, systematic misinformation that YouTube doesn’t want to actively help spread.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Parler asked people for their SSNs, and Cambridge Analytica wasn't a household byword for invasion of privacy when people were clicking on quizzes.

So, it's worth considering that people might indeed happily sign up for a rogue node that steals their info without knowing what's going on.
So the answer to my question was "yes" then, thank you. I don't know what I would call that practice but it is not any kind of "open source circle of life".

> It's a part of the product's life cycle that's in any startup book.

There are many start-ups truly committed to open source development. Conversely, there are many who are not but are pretty upfront and honest about how they are not. I don't judge either one as I'd rather not be a zealot, and one ought to do what one ought to do.

However, there are also some companies (thankfully a minority, as far as I can tell) who are not really committed whatsoever to open source, but still pretend to be (often using marketing speak like "the ideology is in our blood") for the sake of good publicity. Those I don't like, but then again most of them are large corporations, so it's not like there's much one can do in that area.
You may be missing that the guy behind Rocky, Gregory Kurtzer, is the original founder of CentOS. He has some credibility in the field.
The files are big now. ~30 MB.

Size was not really a goal for the first pass of the feature.
I think is a perfect encapsulation of the muddled thinking that is caused by this kind of misinformation. This is a really narrow example, and it doesn't generalize any conclusions about to the entire electoral system the way you are suggesting it might.

For some reason, consumers of misinformation take these small fragments and use them to cast doubt on the entire system, which is a conclusion totally out of proportion to the evidence. But if you say that out loud, all you will get is a blank stare.
https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192

Palo Alto. Someone pays $1081 per year living adjacent to someone who pays $24K per year.
That's one situation, but when I said "earned due to work in CA" I meant work that is physically done in CA, not just work for a CA-based company.

For example, let's say I live in Texas and work for a Texas based company at a salary of $100k/yr. I spend most of my time in Texas, but I travel a lot for work and for 12 weeks of the year, I spend Monday through Friday in California.

Since I am a resident of Texas, I pay taxes on all of that $100k to Texas (but since TX has no income tax, it's moot).

However, I spent 12 weeks of that work in California, making me a nonresident worker in California. I owe CA income tax on $100k * (12 weeks spent in CA / 52 total weeks in a year) = ~$23k. If I have enough deductions in CA to offset that, I might end up owing nothing and any paid taxes might all get refunded to me. But if I don't have enough deductions, I might owe CA some tax money.
> allowing companies to legally select which viewpoints to promote while shielding them from liability for promoting harmful messages

This is a spurious criticism. Websites are already liable for any illegal content they host if they don't make a good-faith effort to have it removed quickly. Fake news isn't illegal, this isn't something that would be improved by rescinding section 230.

> There's also the notion that in a free society, companies shouldn't have the freedom to discriminate on the basis of someone's politics

This has no practical meaning because literally anything can be framed as political issue. For example, the efficacy of masks and vaccines.

> People who oppose discrimination on the basis of certain protected categories have the opportunity to explain why political views are not one of those categories.

Protected classes are the few exceptions to the rule, the burden is on you to explain why politics should be added to the list.
How does it change the fact that Apple is on the oppressive side?
Furthermore, commercial involvement in open-source doesn't require an "open source business model" which will placate VC-level ambitions.

For instance, the extremely popular model of a company hiring core maintainers (or other experts) for an open source project which is critical to business success continues to be viable.

The business can make its money a different way; so long as the ROI justifies open source involvement, it will happen.
Well, pensions are taxable just like regular income. Minus some exclusions usually. People are just trying to extend their retirement as far as possible.

It might just be that income tax isn't the best/fairest tax.
Not really, I think. Startup of a "hello world" seems to be 5ms faster on my Windows machine: https://gist.github.com/MarkTiedemann/c2f4013c3a60bb28df5005...
The link shows its 48MB for a trivial program (I assume its trivial - its called "cat")
> We can see that each page loads over 15 MB of JavaScript code.

It’s rumored that the compute Google sells is actually performed by that JavaScript code, running in customers browsers. :P
Bebop: An extremely simple, fast, efficient, cross-platform serialization format
No, there's not really any optimization. It's more of a bundling convenience. It still includes V8.
And manipulative.
I don't understand, I thought that was the biggest surprise out of that trove of emails? It was a surprise to me, anyways.

"The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality,[6] as several DNC operatives seemed to deride Sanders' campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

"A new leak of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee appears to support the long-held suspicions of some Bernie Sanders supporters that the DNC was working against him." - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-sanders_...

"DNC Apologizes to Bernie Sanders and Supporters Over Leaked Emails" - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-sanders_...

I'm not meaning to be partisan about this. My point was that everyone is trying to manipulate the American public - both political parties, big companies, other countries, etc.
Is it better than anything I'm going to cook myself? "Yes."

That's the only relevant question, at least for me, and the answer is pretty much always the same.
Uh oh. I don’t have access to any of those options. Where can I buy an EMP? Amazon?
I totally agree with you, but the thing is even these small, isolated cases that are backed by some evidence won't be allowed on YouTube.
Well that is mighty interesting! I think I’ve got all the necessary parts to make a non-AVR-based unit on the shelf here... Cortex m0 LoRa feather and an ESP32 feather! Seems like a fun holiday project!
disclaimer: i work in google cloud, but on the apps side.

One thing worth noting here is that google pretty famously has a monorepo and single-version policy. Meaning: while you may be right about the subteams/orgchart meta-issue, it's not actually shipping multiple versions of the same subcomponent. There's just one version.
HN: "SpaceX Launches and Nearly Lands Starship on Its First Suborbital Flight"

vs

Article: "SpaceX Launches—and Crashes—Its Starship Mars Rocket"
interestingly there's a local startup here in Boise that is trying to pre-empt your experience. They are a ghost kitchen that also owns the logistics (delivery) the ordering software, and have hired chefs to build menus specifically targeted at being delivered and still being good.

https://www.cravedelivery.com/

I'm actually going to order dinner from them now as a first time user (i've been signed up for a while but now after reading this thread i'm curious what the quality is like)

will report back.
BikePaper: DIY e-ink bike computer
I read there was a "$2.2 trillion dollar Coronavirus Aid Relief" -- 1% of that could have raised the nurses salaries fairly much, for one year? (In the US)

Edit: now i see in sibling comments to yours, that apparently nurses are getting paid more (in the US)

I'm in Europe actually and seems the decision makers with the money doesn't care that much about the nurses
Absolutely nothing about the USA is in danger of falling apart. These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two.

Yes, totally normal to have armed militias running around state capitols, organizing kidnap plots of governors, retired generals calling for suspension of the Constitution etc., happens every election cycle.

/sarcasm
Roger Stone.
I'm aware, the picture was to show what the liner looks like (approximately), the engines are of similar design. I apologize if anyone thought that was literally the liner in question.
No, I Am Not Getting Rid of My Thousands of CDs
> Broadcasting = YouTube

Youtube is a distributed (as in "many people") media, which is essential for democracy. In some countries, it's the only source of truth about the politics.
Seems like it's big, our Go CLI clocks in about 30MB on Linux. Deno with hello world is like 32MB.

But I honestly don't mind up until about 100MB.
Never used PHP for anything major before, but the changes in PHP 8.0 seem to fix a lot of what I’ve heard complaints about in the past. Probably not enough to fix the whole “lol PHP bad” meme, but still nice to see the improvements.
I remember watching the Tesla going into space and the rockets landing on the platform. I remember thinking "Wow this man has restarted the space race for my generation." It was a hopeful and wonderful feeling, I figured with the budget cuts, the politics, and the general "been there done that" attitude that was prominent for much of my life space was closed.

To see it opened again, gives me some sort of hope, some idea that there are things bigger than our squabbles, we took one giant leap for mankind when we stepped on the moon, but it's time for the next step to see what we can do after a leap.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but when I read "12-day grace period" it makes me wonder if they were compelled to maintain access until...something finished.
Yeah, its especially horrible in python for webdev. How are you supposed to deploy django/flask projects when NOT using docker or some PassS?

I haven't figured out anything better than a git pull script to update things. I can't imagine there is nothing better in 2020.