skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a tournament increasing funding will increase the number of winners but suffering will increase further if the greater number of winners leads to more entrants. Academia is a tournament. Most people who get a Ph.D. are aiming at a professorship and they’re not going to get it. They’re not going to get it after sourcing six years of their life, perhaps twelve or fourteen single mindedly chasing that goal. If you increase funding for a brief period there will be more spots but competition will re-emerge quickly. Things aren’t going to improve. The only people with the power to change anything are those who won under the current system. They have no motivation to change it so they won’t.
A good start would be to stop using this stupid terminology. Quoting RMS [0]:

I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171108235001/http://mail.fsfeu...
I've just accepted a semi-permanent professorship after being a postdoc for several years. I've had a handful of grants accepted and the vast majority not -- some schemes have a <2% success rate (with applications coming from the best people on the planet) and the thing that just kills me is how the 'peer review' of grants tends to be "do I like you or not". I've been outright told that unless x- or y- is on the grant, it won't get funded. And, irritatingly, those complaints are right. I'm faced with the daunting -- but exciting -- prospect of trying to somehow be one of those academics who people do not hate. I very much think that the pressures are there on both sides; they're different, but being a postdoc does just suck for everything aside from the work – I think I was on my 13th short term contract (three of them 3 months or less!) before getting a permanent post. Naturally, this post is in a different country from my friends, family, and partner. I signed the paperwork last week. It's been three days and I desperately miss my partner -- who is also an academic -- and the cat.

One (tenured) professor I knew left to go and work for his spin-out full time in industry. He told me that his belief was that academia was so bloody awful because it was a luxury: society wants you to continue to justify your existence sitting around and thinking every few years, whereas in a company, the $/€/£ is all the justification needed. I'm not sure to what extent I agree with that, but it's definitely plausible.
I’m a staff scientist and watch post docs and students get ground up into grant fodder in a regular basis. Sure there are discoveries but at what cost to our mental health?

I think there are two politically convenient roles to academia: (1) allow a country to posture about money is has to spend, case in point are EU flagships which everyone agrees is a big waste but it puts EU on the map, research wise. (2) it keeps smart, will to power people occupied far enough away from real society problems such as racism, climate change, poverty and so on, to stabilize the status quo. Imagine what would happen if people who can do 80 hour weeks churning through genetic data to generate new insights (or similar for different fields) started working in earnest on evidence driven policy change?

I think these roles are more explanatory for the funding of science than the discoveries themselves.
It won't be taken by everyone in the world. There are countless vaccines being developed. The two mRNA based ones were the quickest to fulfil the criteria of their phase three trials. The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine and Sputnik V are based on more conventional methods (adenovirus vector) for example.

Also: the implication of your statement about the "most fragile 1 percent" is that their lives are worth less than others. I cannot begin to describe the disgust I am feeling towards such an inhumane attitude.
> Do Uber drivers have to pay a license to have the radio on in the car?

In the UK, yes, https://pplprs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/PRS-for-Music-Tariff...
Replaced mbp 13" 2016 16gb with mba 8gb m1 and the difference is huge. Made me move to VS Code remote because homebrew is broken. Really digging it as a setup. Drives my LG 5k smoothly.
What’s the status of the European review?
"the nearly unlimited potential upside" is very low probability, and if people are being fully honest with themselves, they often already know before they start their postdoc whether it's going to be worth their time.

The reality is that in academia, pedigree matters, being surrounded by very smart people matters, name matters. If you don't have all of these then your postdoc is doomed to be nothing more than a mediocre-paper-mill at best. Better to get out sooner rather than later.
Content sells the tech. The tech makes the most money though.

Microsoft is 1 tril bigger in market cap than Disney. Strange to use a Bill gates quote and then discuss Disney films.

Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.

The article touches on this and could expand on it. No new tech launch is going to work without content, so in that sense it is king, but the money is in the tech.
I haven't seen any support for the argument that nuclear mistakes would cause extinction of the human species outside of fiction.

Arguably, we've already had at least two mistakes of the nuclear weapons kind in history already.
External Hard Disk and SSD to Buy for 2021
In the video the drone self-destructs by exploding and producing shrapnel, I doubt knockback is a problem.
Yeah wipe it. Mine is blazing fast and I started fresh.
I accidentally stumbled on keeping a commonplace book in a surprising way. Many years ago my close knit circle of friends abandoned Facebook for privacy reasons and one of us who is a web dev set up a minimal discourse instance.

I found myself using it almost exactly how one might use a commonplace book and I feel that there are real cognitive benefits to this habit.

Of course we also use it much like one might use a private Facebook group or private subreddit...
Kids are being kept out of school so they don’t get the virus and spread it to somebody else. They aren’t immune, as far as I know. Just less likely to die from it.
I don't use streaming services because I disagree with their insulting revenue for the artists.

Fortunately I've always been one to seek out more underground artists, and platforms like Bandcamp have been amazing. Not only do the artists get an order of magnitude more revenue, sellers can offer merchandise and physical media (vinyl, CD, cassette) too. These often include a digital copy.

Due to the closer connection between artists and fans I've received many signed/personalised records for the collection over the years. Artists can also gauge demand for future releases almost like crowdfunding.

To me Bandcamp has been the saviour of music in the streaming age.
Of course, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem to me like the game should be played this way, so I'm not surprised those who try are having a bad time.
Solving Algorithmic Problems in Python with Pytest (2019)
As long as one uses a single parser to read a particular input it matters little if it produces a result that is different from what some other parser generates as long as the parser has no security bugs. And JSON is simple enough to cover a particular interpretation of its spec with test suits to make a security vulnerability extremely unlikely.

Surely if one uses one parser to verify the payload and another to use it, a disaster comes as was with IPhone verification bug.
> The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

I'm not below the age of 25 but this seems like a really archaic statement. This is basically equivalent to "Kids these days have no idea what it means to have to watch commercials and shows you didn't want to watch to get to that show you were really looking forward to."
In this post: Trumpist talking points, misinterpreted science, outright lies. Caveat lector.
It's just like releasing Cyberpunk early with lots of bugs, except here we (and especially the senators who fly a lot as well I imagine) can die.
Was this coaching after the crashes, during the new recertification?
"inhumane attitude" could also be a good qualifier for using the population as lab rats.

it's called a tradeof , and public policies is doing it all the time, including accepting people dying for the greater good of others. Otherwise we would have banned cars a long time ago.
Uhm, the Spanish flu infected 500 million people (6.5 times more than covid19) and killed about 50 million (33 times more than covid19). And if you consider that the world at that time had just about 2 billion people, a modern Spanish flu would have killed 175 million people (100 times more than covid19), and probably more since denser population makes it easier for viruses to spread.

Now, we have the (repeatedly) proven ability to avoid such a disaster, and you argue we should not? You really think protection from disease is not a basic human right?
> So you'd have to repeatedly engage to get your stabilizer to where you want it and cut the power.

No. The electric trim switches override the MCAS signal (in addition to resetting the timer). You can just hold them on until the trim is normal. This is indeed what both the LA and EA crews did repeatedly, they just did not then turn off the stab trim.

This procedure is detailed in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX pilots after the first crash.

Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive

"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."

https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
Seniority shouldn’t just imply power, but responsibility over others.

A master should be judged by the success of his apprentice just as much as his own skill.

It’s saddening to see that people are being exploited in such a direct, obvious way. And it just happily goes on?
It's a little strange relationship. Tech without content can't survive. Whereas good content can spread far and wide without tech.
That's pretty nifty. I didn't think nitrocellulose film was manufactured anymore. If not, I wonder what movie they got it from. This is a good application for it, certainly.
At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
An aside, but I was so confused by the "dot slash" link ("./") until I realized he means "/.", Slashdot.

EDIT: Edited because people got upset.
Australia's welfare system isn't "pretty good". It's terrible.

Targeting simply means more stigma towards poor folks, and narrower political support. Less targeting is actually better if you want more redistribution, more equality, broader political support, and less stigma. Welfare shouldn't be simply a last-resort safety net for the most unfortunate, it should help everybody live a smoother, easier life.

The means-tested pension is particularly bad - all it does is result in people restructuring their finances to hack the means-testing measure, and make average people obsessed with "super" (privatized retirement accounts) instead.

Key thing to remember is that welfare "spending" isn't "spending" or "costs" in the sense that eg buying a fighter jet is. It's just redistribution - so tax "churn" or low "targeting" doesn't really matter.
This toy project https://github.com/pjmlp/gwc-rs takes 16 minutes to compile from scratch on a core 2 machine, with 8GB and a SSD.

The original one in Gtkmm, takes around 5 minutes in release mode, if that much.
This is amazing, congratulations! As someone who’s been struggling with excess weight, I’d love these interviews to focus more on HOW they achieved the results and the struggles they overcome (and how) along the way! Hopefully 2021 is the year when I get into the healthy mindset and lose the extra 60 lbs.
If you grip the control column, there's a switch toggle with 3 push-to-hold positions under your thumb. Nose up, off, nose down. It directly turns on the stabilizer trim motor, overriding any other signal.

It's informally called a pickle switch.
Wait, you can use more than 1 character for generic types?!

My whole life is a lie!
> Glory days. Long before spreadsheets, IBM managers wrote their budgets in APL, and lucrative timesharing services supported users around the world.

Imagine a world where spreadsheets grew from being a living, easily accessible version of everything APL offered (which has been true for about two decades) into everything Q (and kdb+) supports including serving web content and cross-platform database queries.
Here is my interpretation.

Carmack is saying learning something deeply, for example learning all features of a tool, helps in the long run, but in this approach it takes a while to provide value.

An alternate approach is to learn a subset that provides immediate values. In the case learning only the subset of features of the tool that are being used at that time. That's more tractable and allows you to provided immediate value.

He is leaning towards the 2nd approach because first groups of people are opinionated without broad experience.

Elon Musk said something very similar. He said, lets say you need to use a wrench, but if you start from the very basic it would be extraordinarily difficult to start working. Instead you can just starting learn about the wrench and go backward from there. This was you are providing immediate values to the work at hand.
Yes, and no. The principle is there, but it is important to understand that each cell type is essentially a specialist factory to produce proteins, and the drug may be produced best when you get exactly the right factory to produce the protein (I’m thinking about PTMs). If your body is flooded by inferior product from the wrong factories, the effect of the superior product may be inhibited of diluted.

That said, I can imagine once we figure out how to deliver the mRNA to precisely the right targets, this would be a lot easier (eg engineering receptor ligands onto the mRNA lipid delivery particles).
Openly criticizing may just mean that they want a lot of corrupt money in return.

What happened with the Hungarian and Polish veto was terrifying for me: the governing prime ministers got away with all the money stealing despite the huge criticism. The only rational explanation is that they will continue chanelling lots of money back to Germany through car companies.
>— if subscribers are added and consumption stays flat, rights holders just make more per stream. But a move toward podcasts could cost rights holders leverage in licensing negotiations.

Could someone else confirms that. Because that is not the way how I know it works. Has this been changed?
No, you have a superficial understanding of what happened.

If the AoA sensor was damaged or mis-calibrated on the 737 MAX, then the odds became very, very high of an accident.

False certification paperwork was submitted, which side-stepped oversight by the FAA.

The goal of airline passenger flight in the West is zero accidents, so a loose-end like MCAS is not acceptable at all to regulatory bodies and operators.

Also, I don't think there were "hundreds of thousands of flights for Boeing 737 Max." 400 airframes were shipped, so it's probably about 10% of that.
Reminds me of discworld’s unseen university.
Was it this maybe? https://www.diffblue.com/
There was paper tape pre-impregnated with insecticide so actual bugs would be discouraged from corrupting your data.
If you want to learn how the CCP works, watch the NTD/Epoch Times channels on Youtube. The CCP has had an undeclared war against the US since the 1950's, starting with Mao.

A short summary of CCP "elite capture" is:

- Mitch McConnell's wife is high-level CCP royalty

- the CCP spy Fang Fang "dated" several US politicians

- Hunter Biden is thoroughly compromised by the CCP

- it appears the CCP owns Dominion, the voting machine used in 29 states.

- the Thousand Talents program has signed up over 7,000 foreign professors and researchers. They agree to license patents to China, and not to criticize the CCP.
Anker PowerPort Cube Best USB Power Strip: Overload Protection for iPhone
it certainly does, younger people have stronger immune systems, and therefore generally react better to vaccines than older people. The stronger the immune system reacts to a vaccine the better, since that usually ensures that there will be an immune-response to the actual virus as well.
Of course, if your abstraction was an interface, you could just use a different implementation of the same interface.
Okay, we've researched mRNA medicine since the 90s. But have similar medicines been given to a million people? Have those been tracked for three decades? We're talking about scaling that up by a factor at 10-100+, and giving it to millions of healthy people with many decades of life ahead. What if some serious adverse reaction happens ten years later, to 0.1% of the 20-year olds who take it today? Worth it?

The efficacy of the new mRNA vaccines is fantastic. It's a no-brainer to give them to people with a high likelihood of having a serious covid case.

Maybe it's justified to also give it to everyone else, to mitigate the economic effects of the epidemic. But asking this question is qualitatively different than what you hear from people who are normally skeptical towards vaccines. This is a completely new type of prophylactic, there is potential of an unknown unknown.

I'm typing this contrarian comment mostly to document that I've thought about it, in case, heaven forbid, we make a horrible discovery about it in 2025.

Honestly - aren't there researchers working in the field thinking similar thoughts? Is it such a taboo interjection that they don't dare speak it out loud out of fear of being compared to antivaxxers? I don't believe that it's an excessively cautious concern.
To add, Ganja pronounced with very short sound of "a" means bald :)

Ganja as hemp is mostly pronounced as Gaanjaa, but accepted spellings are Ganja.
Oh, man I hate wire binding with a thunderous passion!

It may look OK when new, but after having travelled a dozen times in your backpack it decomposes in the worst way. Pages start making a creaky sound when turning, they get stuck in the uneven wires, and inevitably start to separate, often from the middle of the page, which is extremely annoying and difficult to fix. When you try to re-fold the wires correctly with your fingers, it becomes worse. The only advantage with respect to spiral winding is that the actual binding act is faster to perform (but it requires a heavy equipment).

Spiral binding, on the other hand, is extremely elegant. It is the most robust shape ever, no matter how you compress it between hardcover books it always performs its job. The only way to separate the pages is by tearing the paper. You can bind them yourself with a simple multi-hole punch, and I actually find it a pleasing thing to do.

By the way, I don't understand your first comment. Spiral bound paper always lies open flat directly. On the other hand, for wire binding it may not (because the papers reach the fold of the wire).
And in both cases, it was a sign of mismanaged design. I have encountered THAT EXACT bug, and the reason we supported both was because both were released and users began to expect both pages for different reasons. What we needed was a designer to sit down and say, hey, this design seems replicated, how do we mitigate this? This version of DRY becomes a business and resource problem, above the developer, and unfortunately, this means that you or do not have the resources to adequately deal with it.
> JS needs to be off by default and whitelisted only for the (very few) sites that one truly trusts.

Or the information provided by JS regarding the local machine should be reduced
"There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs"
- Some wise guy
> After all, Star Wars is supposed to be ancient history

Star Wars is "supposed" to be ancient history within the fiction of its own story. George Lucas doesn't think it actually is ancient history.

Contrast this with George Martin's assertion that the Dothraki are "an amalgam of steppe and plains cultures [...] seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy" (or that the sexual violence in his books mirrors that of the real medieval history). This is an "out of fictional universe" argument, different from Star War's fictional conceit that it takes place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away".
Doing a PhD is definitely not the same thing as becoming an academic. If anything, the PhD is a direct career boost: it's a recognised, high-level qualification that is known the world over (and, incidentally, if you go outside the US, you can probably get it done an awful lot quicker...). If you love the subject -- and you have to love the subject -- do it. It's like being paid to play.

Going from PhD to Prof though, is a difficult, unlikely path of awkward postings: for every 100 PhDs expect ~1 successful academic. Oh, and once you are a professor, expect a salary....less than that you'd get in a starting job straight out of your PhD.
Heavy forest? Dense? That is a park, and not dense at all.
The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (1990)
No lol it's not possible to learn any math subject in depth in an afternoon, unless you mean "get a surface overview that you'll forget most things about in a couple of weeks". Proper foundations for non-Euclidean geometry are at least a one-semestre undergrad class level of work, which will take you at least several weeks if you do _only that_
You seem to be implying that transfer of funds can only fall into a few categories, e.g. robbery, sale and alms. Well, reality is more complex than that.

If two people are married but have separate bank accounts, and one of them asks their spouse to transfer some funds into his account because some joint expense will come out of it - is he "begging"?

When a member-funded NGO reminds its members to pay their annual dues - is it "begging" them?

You could claim the answer is "Yes", but then - the world has a whole lot of begging going on.
They list 5600XT, card slower than Nvidia 4 year old 1070, at 350 Euro. 220 Euro for a 5500, slower than 4 year old 1060, slower than $160 MSRP 1650s. But wait, there are no 1650s in stock, and no 1060, and no 1070. There is 1660 Ti however, $280 MSRP, listed at 410 Euro .... thats almost twice the msrp for a 2 year old product.

The only products they havent run out of are listed at 2x the markup.
Every print shop has at least an A3 printer anyway.
No, Rust's non-lexical lifetime does not change when things are dropped at all. It is purely a compile time feature with no run time effects.