skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Federally subsidized student loans need to GO AWAY.

The language I'm about to use pains me, but this is an extremely privileged take, or at least naive take, on what these loans do. Removing them will hurt about about a generation of students from the very low to the upper middle class set until the academic<>employment market adjusts. What do I mean?

A simple, pragmatic fact is degree from a name-school, vs. a no-name school, is a differentiator to a student who knows what they're doing. This is especially true with grad schools where it's professionally-focused on the outcome. NYU Law vs. CUNY Law. UMass Dartmouth CS vs. BU CS. You're buying a network and a door opener with the latter. One resume gets you an informational interview, a priv'd coop/internship, an alumni network and so on, and the other has an uphill battle. For many underpriv'd students, that network-buy is life changing. I wish it wasn't the case, but pretending that it isn't is damaging. This is just the way of things at the moment.

By getting rid of fed-sub'd loans, you:
- take away motive-neutral funding route for your cheap but no-name undergrad -> good grad school -> good new career
- open only profit-motive funding routes from private loan companies, which.... this never works out well for consumers.
- open this priv'd route of good schools to increasingly only the elite.

I'd agree with the point that a cheap state school for undergrad, a "known" school for grad school funded by however one can get it funded makes more financial<>career sense, but that nuance didn't exist in your argument.
I follow Navalny fairly closely. It does give me pause that he recovered faster from a "military neurotoxin" than I recover from a cold, and I am younger and fitter than him.

Does give the "internal opposition" theory some credence. This also comes from an understanding of this being the modus operandi for GRU and KGB, where they constantly competed against one-another and Politburo making the trifecta that ensured stability for the top echelon.
re·tard
verb
past tense: retarded; past participle: retarded
/riˈtärd/
delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment.
"our progress was retarded by unforeseen difficulties"

It seems to me that the word's usage is an accurate description of America's lack of progress in this area...
Believe it or not, some people love personalised ads. I know several (they all happen to be women, but I'm sure many men also like them). It's a bit of a tautology - they wouldn't be so profitable and dominant if people weren't clicking on them, so somebody is doing it, and in massive numbers. They wouldn't like going back - my mom is already angry that using my home wifi messes up the ads she gets.

Obviously this shouldn't be read as an endorsement for FB's practices - I think they are as scummy as Apple's anti-competitive bullying of iOS developers. It's unbelievable that we're now openly longing for something that looks a lot like the Windows software market circa 2001: compared to today, it was a paradise of open competition and almost-entire privacy.
One random thing I love about Threema is their slow release development cycle. It seems like they only do a new release when there is something big, and then all the tiny little changes are bundled with it.

It makes the app feel more stable.

In comparison, some apps release once or twice per week and the user is left thinking “oh great, what is going to break this time?”
Contracts can include penalties like late fees, having such penalties apply to poor worker conditions is well within their negotiating power for a new contract.
I do some optics design. The Lytro was exciting. Reinforcing what you say, when a light ray hits a pixel on a conventional sensor, the sensor only knows where the pixel is located on the sensor. Ensuring that each pixel corresponds to a specific location in the scene being photographed is the lens design problem in a nutshell.

But a ray has both a position and a direction vector. If you can measure the complete ray vector -- its position and direction at the same time, then you can compute where it came from, even if the lens is not perfectly designed. The light field sensor relaxes the lens design problem considerably.

An earlier technology called a Shack-Hartmann sensor, similarly measures the full light field at once. It's used for things like measuring the wavefront quality of lasers.

There is still a problem, which is that you have to assign a physical sensor pixel to each point in a 4-d space (2 position and 2 direction coordinates), which means that you have to give up some of the spatial resolution of the sensor. This makes it hard to compete in a market that is clamoring for more and more megapixels. Instead, the sales pitch has to be more nuanced, as in comparing the actual image quality of the pictures, which is a harder sell when the quality of pictures from cell phone cameras is pretty damn good.
The tax implications make this deal a bad one nearly every time. It's simply not worth taking the chance.

(BTW: Congress bailed out dot-com specu-vestors who claimed not to understand the tax event that occurrs when exercising options. https://www.mercurynews.com/2008/11/10/rescue-bill-offers-re... )
Is this a snarky comment or is this an actual experience that’s happened to you or someone you know? I’m genuinely curious, I can definitely imagine hospitals trying something like this…
There's no "market" in healthcare in the US.

Long ago, it became illegal to open a hospital without a 'certificate of need' from the State. That's why so many towns have only one hospital - it's a government granted monopoly like cable companies in the 80s.

Differential pricing is also illegal. You fly cheap on Sunday at 3am, expensive on Monday at 9am. Healthcare providers are not allowed to charge less when it's cheap to do so, for example allowing you to do an MRI cheaper at 3am.

Your employer picks a monopoly insurer for you to chose a plan from.

The list goes on and on. There's no market here, it's a set of monopolies. It should be legal to open a hospital. Differential pricing should be legal. Your employer should let you chose from at least two insurers.
I haven't used Cinnamon in a few years, but when I did, I loved it. It felt like the true spiritual successor to the GNOME 2 shell.
The sad thing is, as expensive as healthcare is they probably have to jack up those rates because they are getting screwed everywhere else.
In the end, though, the consumer is always the one who ends up getting the ultimate screw... exactly why healthcare shouldn't be seen as a service to consume.
Don’t want to labour this, but undermining democratic societies is such a negative it’s pretty hard to see any app balancing that one out. And that’s just a single example.
In most of the rest of the western world, the cost of childbirth is mainly the parking fee and snacks from a vending machine while waiting.
Virtual Research Environment 1.0 released
Even if schools could accurately estimate the "value" of a degree based on expected future earnings, that estimate is going to be affected by a potential student's employability, and the risk that the student may not complete the program.

"Tie student loan funding to the value of a degree" is a fantasy. In the real world, what would actually happen is that student loans would become limited to those who could put up some sort of collateral, which for the figures involved involved in a typical college education would largely limit it to the already-wealthy.
There is no such thing as idiomatic Common Lisp.
Apple actually gets a decent amount of coverage for their very impressive injection moldings. Most advancements in IM today are not in the ability to make complex parts, but more in the ability to make them pretty.

Apple makes many parts with extremely tight tolerances with almost no visual defects, and within the industry it's understood that it's extremely hard to make your IM parts look like Apple's for that reason.
Agreed -- writing toy programs generally doesn't teach you a whole lot about a new programming language. To learn it in a deep way you need to use it properly, on real problems.

Although, if you're mainly interested in getting something done rather than using it as a learning experience, using an unfamiliar language is probably a bad idea. You'll learn a lot about a new language, but you probably won't build anything you could actually ship.
So, I love a putin-bashing story like anyone else but, how do we know any of this story ISN'T fabricated? I take the data collected about the location of these alleged agents can be strong evidence that these people were tailing Navalny, but how can we know for sure that any of the exchange between the alleged agent and Navalny himself is true or factual?

I'm only asking because I'm surprised an actual agent would be so verbose via phone, regardless of how good Navalny was at pretending.

Is it just due to the reputation of the investigators (bellingcat and co.)?
I became a millionaire with options from a startup IPO and hardly feel that I won the lottery. There’s thousands of employees at dozens of private companies that either went public this year or will next that will be in the same position.

Certainly it helps that there’s a deluge of liquidity in the financial markets right now that has completely changed the calculus from even just a year ago. I would certainly be much more optimistic now than any other recent point in time if you work at a company with good growth prospects.
This comment looks like it's bought
The logic is that “white people are stupid” or “men are pigs”, while unkind words, are not associated with widespread historically persistent violence and systematic oppression. Does it hurt your feelings? Maybe. But the targeted groups they’re apparently focusing on are targeted for more than hurt feelings.
A time machine for your career
They’re not nuanced or complicated. If society (taxpayers) want the benefit of a populace educated in those fields, they need to pay for them by funding schools.
I think Facebook prefers the business model where users (their product) think their service is free. This is partially how they've taken the entire digital social world over with their services. With this change, Apple is now forcing them to expose their business model to users (their product). This transparency will inevitably cost them dearly.
Thank you for that. This film has been sitting in my Netflix queue for over a decade. I feel like I should see it, but didn't ever actually desire to. It's clearly very beautiful and I can't imagine when I'll ever be in the mood to sit and watch it for over an hour.

So thanks for pointing out a really great scene. Now I can take it off the list.
Sure, Intel didn't have any serious patents on the 8080 but they did copyright the assembly language mnemonics. So the Z80 was 100% compatible at the binary level but had to use other names for the instructions. Same thing with trademarks.

What I was saying is that what is described in the patent text can be freely used after the patent expires.
Fortunately it's still not a totalitarian state. It's just an authoritarian kleptocracy where due to rampaging corruption everyone can buy spy agency staff phone billing and banking data for few hundred dollars.
A Beginner’s Guide to Italian Ghost Towns Selling Houses for €1
Alternative for linux (especially great on eOS): NaSC (https://parnold-x.github.io/nasc/)
> There’s also the fact that GDPR is a directive. Each state (nation) has to implement it in their own laws. So the EU itself can’t enforce it, only the member states.

It's not. It's a "Regulation", a similar kind of legal act to a Directive, but comes into effect all on their own, across the whole of the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union)
The annoying thing is, most people would agree that the whole system sucks... until you start talking about politics and suddenly you'd think a bunch of people have a love affair with their insurance company and healthcare providers.
try paying rent, buying medicine for your kids, books, etc. good luck
“The ride is smoother with Labour”; A new slogan for Keir's Labour
And you won't believe how safe those coupons are
I think a lot of people, at least in the western world, wouldn't mind paying say $1-2 dollars a month maybe even more..

The problem is that Facebook only represents good value (paid in ad views, personal data, or money as you suggest) if lots of your friends stay on it. It needs the "network" aspect of social networking to operate. Consequently, even if you're willing to pay $1/month if your friends aren't to pay then that $1 represents terrible value and you'll leave because there's no value in paying.

This is the inherent problem in charging for any 'network' product - it has to represent good value for everyone not just a few people.
It’s a captive audience problem. Same reason why a bottle of water can cost $8 in an airport, students are required to buy specific textbooks, sold through limited outlets. Textbooks sometimes get wrapped in to the loans which is also why schools charge so much. What bothers me are the fees, from parking to wellness to lab fees, while administrators make six figure salaries. Universities are such a financial imbalance of corruption.
Experts on Android and iOS Users Blackmailed by ‘Goontact’ Spyware
So how can modern global warming be attributed to pollution? I suppose not all, but it seems like a large % of the population acts as if this is something which has been happening over the past 200 years. This bitch been melting for thousands of years.
What? Just track the customers that don’t pay. Don’t do anything with paying customers. Where is the problem? This sounds like a false defence.
Old-growth go from stand to stump on B.C.’s Vancouver Island
Better by what standard? The current system is definitely better at creating half baked artists.
I think it depends on if you trigger the Alternative Minimum Tax. The default is that you don't pay taxes on ISOs at execution time, but if you trigger AMT then suddenly you do pay taxes, it can be a lot of taxes, and you may have no way to sell the stock to get the cash to pay the taxes.

(Obvious you should talk to a tax professional rather than taking advice from a random stranger on the internet before taking any action.)
I don't think they just pull 125k out of the air. I think that at 90k you are not going to get many great candidates. And at 250k you risk spending a LOT more money and still not being able to successfully recruit people that are much better than the 125k people. It is not like all your 125k people are going to quit when you double salaries to make way for all the FAANG people who are looking to switch jobs for the same salary.
I don't know if you're counting UK as part of Europe for this purpose, but in the UK credit score is definitely a thing.

It affects whether you can get a mortgage, credit card, loan, purchase credit (e.g. for buying a phone), or even a tiny overdraft, and it enormously affects how much interest you will be charged (i.e. very high or very low), and whether the credit limit you can get is zero, tiny or substantial.
I dunno if its just "how I learned it", but experiments over the GF(5) prime field, followed by the GF(2) then GF(2^x) extension fields has always made the most sense in my brain.

GF(5) is a prime field and is much easier to think about. You have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 as your numbers (and they're "true numbers", not yet polynomials).

The most natural generator is 2.

* 2^0 == 1 mod 5

* 2^1 == 2 mod 5

* 2^2 == 4 mod 5

* 2^3 == 8 mod 5 == 3

* 2^4 == 2^3 * 2 == 3 * 2 == 6 mod 5 == 1 == 2^0

Because 2^4 == 2^0 == 1, you have your loop. All non-zero elements are created by this sequence (because 2 is an appropriate generator). Define multiplication to be consistent with these numbers (and it happens to line up with normal multiplication).

For example:

* 2^4 * 2^3 == 1 * 3 == 2^7 == 2^4 * 2^3 == 2^0 * 2^3 == 3.

-------

Extend the cycle over the negative numbers, and you remain consistent:

* 2^0 == 1 mod 5

* 2^-1 == 3 mod 5

* 2^-2 == 4 mod 5

* 2^-3 == 2 mod 5

* 2^-4 == 1 mod 5 == 2^0

By extending into the negative exponents, we've invented division that's 100% consistent with all other math. Notice that 2^-1 == 3, which is 2's inverse.

2^2 == 2^-2, which is its own inverse. Notice that 4 * 4 == 2^2 * 2^2 == 2^4 == 1. Any number times 4 twice equals itself.

Remember, GF(5) is just simple mod-5 arithmetic. We've redefined multiplication to the above attributes, but it works out how you'd expect. Lets take some random examples of multiplicative inverses / division in GF(5), but "extended" over normal integers outside of the modular space to show you this really is amazing and it works.

* 3 * 2 == 6 mod 5 == 1.

* 4 * 2 * 3 == 24 mod 5 == 4 (notice: 2 * 3 is 1, so when 4 * 1 == 4)

* 4 * 4 == 16 mod 5 == 1

* 2 * 4 * 4 == 32 mod 5 == 2 (notice: 4 is equal to 1/4. So 2 * 4/4 == 2 * 4 * 4 == 2)

-----

A similar exercise can be done over addition. Then a similar exercise can be done over distributive property and even polynomials / quadratic equation / cubics and more!

Logarithms, Square Roots. Everything. All the math you ever learned: shrunk down into the exact space of {0, 1, 2, 3, 4} numbers.

--------

GF(5) is awkward for computers however. To make this "reasonable" for computers, we need to convert it into bits and bytes. Shrink the space down to GF(2) (0 and 1), then extend the space into GF(2^8). Extension fields (taking a "power" of the prime) are... complicated. Very complicated.

An extension field is the GF-version of "complex numbers". You invent a polynomial over "x" (or some indeterminate variable). Complex numbers call it "i", electrical engineers call it "j". In the Complex world, i^4 == 1 (the 4th root of 1 is i). But in GF-version, the variable depends on the size of your field. A GF(2^8) will have x^255 == 1... so you have a much larger "loop" so to speak, but otherwise functions very similar to the Complex i.

But hopefully the experiments in GF(5) show why cryptographers love to use GF() fields in general. Its very useful to have all numbers "loop" back into themselves.
Kodak had what, printers?

Kodak pioneered digital photography (they literally invented the first digital still camera). All through the 80s and 90s they had the best digital camera sensors on the market and where first to release a commercially available DSLR. In the mid 90s they owned the pro DSLR space.

But they didn't want to cannibalize their film market, and after much infighting between senior managers they ended up not investing in the digital lead they had. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Agree with you completely, I will try my best to avoid any products having Wistron as a supplier in future.
I must say that this blog made me sad.

It is exactly due to such thinking code becomes bloated, full of frameworks, zillion of 3rd party libraries for something that could be implemented with bearable codebase by just having a little more experienced crew that is not afraid to "just do it".

Yes, people described are hard to manage but this doesn't mean that there is something wrong with them. It means that they need competent managers that they will respect (Oh and they are there - I had a PM once and we were late on project and people were working into the night, he came to the dev. team, pulled the code and started debugging the issues, testing,... It was not his job (anyway, quite frankly, how many PMs you know that are able to fully use/test the product if you ignore the coding/debugging part). But he never had any issues with engineers ever. This action echoed for a years and he had an endless respect from anyone technical around. But people like this are not found by looking at nice graphs of jira tickets and burndown charts)

As far as I am concerned the whole post comes down to: "B people hire C people, C people hire D people,...". And if what you have are D people (not only engineering), you cant hire A people. They prove D people cant work with them. Or vice versa.

An advice:

Find company with A people. Ignore the rest. And they are there, just not advertised as aiblockchainnosqlserverlessiot (pun intended) companies.

George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

So just be crazy and if you love to code, dont care for the money. It is not the money that makes you happy, it makes happy someone else. Find the company with the code and people that will make YOU happy. And dont crave for social respect from people who dont understand what you are doing by allowing them to drag you to their level and compete with you on "I have a better car" (or "we make loads of money") basis. That is their play and you dont need to play along.
I think the simple answer is to look at how many Euro countries pull off having good universities for low cost... and copy them. No need to reinvent what has already been done. Just need to "port" it to America.
The power of luaJIT is that isn't doesn't take much work to get there. If you do normal things it ends up being very fast by default.
Minutes is a stretch. It will likely take multiple tools and setups to make a mold, and even more if you're starting from a billet that needs facing etc.
this is an example of ultimate centrism. nothing would ever change if people made arguments like these.
> Git didn't exist 15 years ago. A langage like Rust is 10 years old. React is 7 years old. We need these homework problems simply to keep up to date.

None of them were innovative (as in something new) nor belong to CS fundamentals.
Use maths to win at any board game over Christmas
>During the last lockdown schools remained open

Honestly, that doesn't sound like a real lockdown at all.
Why even bother teaching it, then?

(Semi-serious question, as you're quite right that hardly anyone ever needs to write a sort routine by hand these days.)
> Should we have single-payer markets for auto repairs, then? Or how about toilet paper, especially in a pandemic? Both of those are very inelastic, yet socialism has a particularly poor record of producing either reliably.

Why do you segue from single-payer to “socialism”?

Btw not sure about the states, but here in Europe, Single-payer works fine for auto repair, it’s exactly what happens when your car breaks down during the initial warranty - the garage is paid by the car manufacturer, not you. Far less stress than having to tow your car from garage to garage to get quotes :)
It's lovely, true. But! Get some warm clothes!
This isn't an OS in the Windows sense of the term; this is LabVIEW for Quantum, and is sorely needed.
Comparing Pendery 1982 to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?? That’s a really emotionally charged and completely invalid reach.

I’m not sure how a reasonable conversation can continue. We’ve moved to a Twilight Zone alternate reality at this point. The only way we can go further in to la la land is to make a completely invalid comparison to Nazism so that Godwin’s Law can be invoked.

Another thing: Discarding what a judge says about a what is legal matter is not a particularly compelling argument. It’s the kind of thinking done by people who believe in conspiracy theories. As a contemporary example, people who are convinced that the 2020 United States presidential election was rigged, when pointed out that judges have concluded there is no reasonable evidence supporting that assertion, will say something like “I couldn't really care less what the judge concluded”.
>> an increase in labor supply due to women entering the labor force

If you were born before between 1935 and 1955, this might have affected your career progression. Maybe. Because the more workers meant a bigger economy and therefore more jobs overall. If you were born before 1925 or after 1975, it had zero effect.
Except official state propaganda release such interview with their own spy agency staff to prove their innocence. Waning: too funny, you might die of laugh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNEWMrdSNfc