skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not so much about how I learned but how I teach.

Whenever I want to explain how one can do things in SQL I pull up a google/excel sheet and write down some sample data that resembles the problem.

When multiple tables are involved I just write the samples in two different locations within the same sheet.

After that I can just jot down the resulting table below (without writing the actual sheet commands) and maybe some instruction.

Makes all concepts very clear, for example when explaining n:m joins or window functions. Or just the general "table programming" concepts where you add columns rather than variables when you want something done.

Particularly well suited now in covid times when I have to explain things remotely.

SQL and sheets programming are just very closely related.
No, js won't allow you to halt the whole thread to wait for your async function (most runtime implements it as single thread). But kotlin on Java does (while you have absolutely no reason to do that except workaround, you just literally get a slower sync version of that function. It is a escape hole for you to do it sync when something absolutely need it be like that (take a example, the main function))
I think as you do. People are not going to settle for "Well we can keep solar up for up to a few hours when the blizzard comes and reduces radiation levels by 70% with our new battery bank". That's not going to cut it when the blizzard lasts for week. That will never get off the ground.
At my company, we hire contractors usually as a way of staffing at least 30% of the resources in a flexible way. Meaning we keep them for about 3 years, let them go for about 18 months, and they are free to come back for another 3 years. This way the company can just cut them loose if we see a market downturn without having to fire a regular employee.
> My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.

Simple and "saltintesta" writing is effective in many contexts. However, as any critic of Twitter culture can tell you, the style has an important pitfall.

Why do so many people react strongly to seemingly innocuous Graham essays? How does a prescription to "Write Simply" cause such strong emotional reactions?

I think it's in part because Graham writes in a simple and memetic ("saltintesta") style about not-so-simple topics. He writes to a very large audience is filled with readers who have a different latent perspective on that missing detail and nuance. Some of those readers fill in the nuance and context differently from how Graham intended. Unfortunately, they do so while barely noticing the words that got them there! Hence, conflict.

But can we really blame the reader for falling into this pit, when the author's goal was for the words to be barely noticed?

The comments on this article are a case study in the benefits and pitfalls of the Simple and "saltintesta" writing style. The style demands a lot of the reader's latent context. It therefore works well when writing to a group of people who are very much like the author but breaks down when writing across even small differences in culture, life experiences, or values.
Well that would have caused me problems when Oracle started requiring registration for some form of Java downloads.

They haven't spammed that though, I don't think I've ever received any actual email to the "oracleblowsgoats" address. Probably keeps any sales droids from even bothering with me as well.
Stuff like parsing JSON is typically still blocking. I’m sure there are other forms of blocking computation.

JS being single threaded means that while some tracker is parsing a big json blob your website becomes unable to handle input events until the tracker is done.

Let’s say there is an option to do this in some form of threaded worker or coroutines then the main UI thread does not become blocked.
That's likely enough to pull off an identity theft on some level.
What really triggers me is all the conspiracy theories and plain lies being told by government officials to justify what is effectively a genocide of the most vulnerable populations.
Something like that is the idea. Silicon area is what costs money. Use as little as possible while still being fast enough to beat the clock-rate of your system.
PSO's are way better than brute force. but yeah.

It was a purely academic work for a masters level CS unit.
I had just finished a masters level electrical engineering unit on silicon circuit design.
Where the final project was to design an adder that minimized silicon used (and thus cost) while also being faster enough.
And the hard bit is that you want big thick doped regions for high conductivity, but also the bigger the area the more paracidic capacitance.
And so there are some tricks the to find good sizes, like progressive sizing and stuff.
But afaik there is no actual answer, at least not one we ever learned.
So a lot of trial and error went into it.
It was a hard project.

And so then I did this CS unit where the project was "Do something interesting with a particle swarm optimizer".
And i was like "lets solve this".
and once I saw the results, i was like "this is actually really good", and so the lecturer and I wrote a paper about it.

It is a real problem. Minimizing silicon area subject to speed.
I bet the big integrated designers have there own tricks for it that i don't know about.
To do it really well you need to miminal the real area so also need to solve layout (which is a cool cutting and packing problem).
(and ther are also nth order effects, like running traces over things can cause slow downs, because electromagnetism reasons)
I bet a bunch of folk on HN know this problem much better than i do though.
probably something bad in my solution, but i think it illustrates the utility
A bit of both.
You’re welcome. LinkedIn ads are a simple and relatively low-cost way to target job titles and company size. Banner ads work too but the complexity of operating them is high. You might want some way to capture Windows users’ emails with a dedicated landing page. Oh and consider volume pricing.
A lot of journalists have gone down a very tracked and credentialed path, having gone through prestigious institution after prestigious institution to end up in another prestigious institution.

To see someone bypass all the gatekeepers and yet become more of a success than them must really grind their gears.
Yes, I just posted something similar. My domain is initial + surname, and the most common response I get when giving my email is that the person hasn't heard of "that one" before.

To make matters worse, I chose a slightly uncommon tld.
The focus stacking technique was news to me. I've been doing some macro photography of PCB components with an extension tube, but the depth of field is just so shallow that it's hard to see what you're doing. You can't read the text on top of an IC and see sharp solder joints on the bottom at the same time.

But if you put it on a threaded rod, move the camera, and take the in-focus parts from a bunch of pictures, you can see the front and back of the fly at the same time. How cool!
“The current job market” - tech stocks and revenue is exploding, is the job market difficult currently?
https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/136771766876631449...
I don't know of any well written texts about this for laymen, but if you're up for a slightly tough (not too bad) read, this paper provides a nice introduction to the field from 2018, although a small part of it requires a little understanding of maths and statistics symbols.

Grounded Language Learning: Where Robotics and NLP Meet*

https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2018/0810.pdf
There should be a museum for those kinds of HN thread comments.

This kind of prose is truly hilarious.

Thank you.
Your definition thriving isn't too far from mine, I think we just differ as to the expectations we have about the platform in the future.

IBM offers a compelling option:

- yes, your software will continue to run, because that's what the mainframe is for

- yes, it will scale with whatever transaction volume you need in the future, because that's what the mainframe is for

- yes, you can get 99.999999999999999% uptime, because you have reliability built into the platform in astounding depth

- yes, we'll happily help develop new functionality and support your in house staff in managing this system; the mainframe can actually detect faults and arrange a service call.

It's expensive, but it's a safe bet in at very least the medium term. The alternative is quite risky in most cases, and perhaps less expensive over the medium term if it works out.

Nothing is sustainable forever, but that sounds like a pretty hopeful story for IBM over the medium term. Long term, who knows, but eventually we're all dead anyway.
I don’t think so because the notifications in chrome get buried for me. Email alerts for lost in the deluge of work emails. The Apple Watch helps a lot actually
wow. you get a lot more respect for gravity after seeing that. basically, in empty space, i could exert an influence on a bottlecap 10,000 miles away. or something like that, the numbers are entirely irrelevant.
Heroin isn’t prohibited just because people get high on it. It is also prohibited because addicts turn to petty crime, whether targeted at innocent loved ones or strangers, to get the money to support their addiction. So, decriminalizing is never a solution alone. It has to be accompanied with providing addicts with a free supply (and ideally a safe and hygienic space to use it in). It does little good for a society to legalize drugs without also rolling out that public medical infrastructure.
echoing Scratch, it was what my class learned when we were 12 and had a good learning experience w/ it.
Perhaps but this is where gmail is being stupid as they should be able to authenticate that the message actually was genuinely generated from a gmail account.
That seems to be inaccurate. According to Wikipedia, string constants in FORTRAN 66 were named in honor of Hollerith, and the actual wording in the standard is: "4.2.6 Hollerith Type. A Hollerith datum is a string of characters. This string may consist of any characters capable of representation in the processor. The blank character is a valid and significant character in a Hollerith datum."
Apparently the term "string of characters" is assumed to be self-explanatory here, and independent of the "Hollerith" nomenclature. The connection to Hollerith is via punched cards, for which the _encoding_ of characters as bit patterns (hole patterns) was defined; but Hollerith doesn't seem to be directly related to the concept of character strings as such.

It is probably rather by chance that we ended up with the term "string (of characters)", as opposed to for example "sequence of characters". In a different universe we might be talking about charseqs (rhymes with parsecs) instead of strings.
Same here, and neither did my gf even though we've both been there and spent a good +30 years a residents of Sweden.
Really cool!
Same using me@domain.cricket or similar. "Do you mean me@domain.com?"
I enjoy seeing this sort of press for Julia. One thing I’ll say for the language is that it is good with elegant high level abstractions for productivity while at the same time being able to go as low-level as you need for optimization. My company uses Julia for our text structuring ML. From go we communicate with the Julia binary using protobufs. I have no complaints and have enjoyed my experience with Julia.
Learning by doing is the best. It doesn't matter if some other resource is used, if I'm not getting at least one piece of work per month requiring me to meaningfully use it, then I'm not going to get/stay good at it.
This is awesome. But why make the recipient copy and paste the reply address? Can't you use the Reply-To header?
This has been my argument for a long time. Standardize on one of the designs that makes "going critical" is impossible and is "good enough" as power generation and let mass production do its thing. I believe that a lot people who are into "green energy" are also anti-capitalists and think that terms like mass-production are dirty words and tend to ignore history.
> Regulate it out of common frivolous sources like e.g. "exfoliating microspheres"

Already done in the UK and US.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/beauty/skin/the-best-face-and-bo...

See also https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/reel.12269
https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/mic...
I agree on this,
most of our software is also powered by C++ such as trading systems,our defense software,popular databases such as MySQL and even popular games
Well yeah, but the actors that can overcome that barrier are likely the ones you're most worried about in the first place.

So maybe it limits number of adverse actors that can attempt anything, but it doesn't allow you any shortcuts in system design/security.

I've always assumed that frequency barrier stuff was more about defense against tactical, air based electronic jamming/countermeasures.

ETA: Thinking about it some more, what you describe seems like a slightly different type of security by obscurity. If you're relying on it for security.
> the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.

Ah, the good old wrong idea that somehow language is a tool that can clone ideas from one brain to another. It doesn't work like that.
It looks interesting, but I feel the visualizations remove value rather than add it; too busy and abstract so they end up being a distraction more than anything else.
Sadly not just the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Not to mention the multiple times the NSA has been caught this isn't a single country issue, it's a democracy/global issue.
Are patents a problem for software distributed in source code form? I don not think so. I remember something related to font hinting and apple patents that could be circumvented by simply uncommenting part of the code recompiling.
Anyone else raising an eyebrow at a guy like PG with a non-SSL site?
> The dish is completely ruined. It does not work.

It seems to work for those who do it. Should recipes not ever evolve into something different?
Some people like to point to this resource[0]

At the end of the day, it comes down to identifying what kind of audience is reading.

The ideal (and hard) way to go about docs is to be redundant/verbose/overcommunicative to target different audiences with different forms of writing.

The paretto approach is to laser focus on the one type of docs that help the most. My super dumb heuristic for this is just looking at question frequency in chat and offering the FAQ that would've answered the question.

What I sometimes try to do is link from an FAQ to a more elaborate section if there's rationales to be explained. Then the skimmer can quickly copy-paste, and the digger can go optionally read more in-depth content.

Our docs are also loosely structured by order-of-learning (e.g. "what is X", "here's pages about the most important components of X" and how they typically tie together, each page with their own FAQs, and then finally an API reference)

For mithril.js[1], I have intro ("tell me what this is and why should I care"), tutorial ("going from zero to hero"), guides ("how to setup specific things"), API reference ("what methods exist"). There's also a glossary ("what does the lingo mean") and a cheatsheet ("just let me copy and paste").

[0] https://documentation.divio.com/

[1] https://mithril.js.org/
That's not true for *all firefly species, but yes. For those who haven't seen it yet:

https://ncase.me/fireflies/

Also, metronomes:

https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...
This could be an interesting experiment, but I don't think that this would be really practical for two reasons:

a) you can't realistically expect this class of immigrants not to use any social service (especially emergency), there will be costs that US isn't prepared to pay

b) there are bound to be negative consequences for having a explosively growing number of poorly integrated people that are treated as second class by the government
> In europe cinammon is mostly used in desserts so some dishes that use it in India can seem a bit off putting at first, but the truth is, that it has a great pairing with many dishes. Being unused to something and calling it bad are two very different things.

Can you suggest something that goes well with Cinnamon?

It's one of the spices I find the most intriguing! So common for desserts, even in the US, but not for savory food!
The Exit: reflecting on my startup, raising VC, failing, rebuilding, & the exit
Why does everyone seem to be convinced that the spread of misinformation is somehow suddenly a problem? It has been widespread for centuries in our societies and with the exception of a few cases (say, Galileo, crusades, et c) it hasn't really consistently caused any major issues.

This feels very much to me like a "something must be done!"
Great side project you have here? what about making it free and open source? You could accept donations?
Sure, and I’d like to have the physique of LeBron James, the looks of George Clooney, and the intelligence of John Von Neumann, but here I am instead.
Reminds me of something similar that happened in Canada. Satellite boxes were so easy to hack it was more of configuration, cable provider sued for disloyal competition.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bellexpressvu-must-pay-
quebecor-137m-for-not-stopping-signal-piracy-1.2987341

Which brings my question : Would a provider who tolerates account sharing be at risk of being sued by competitors over similar?
My question is that lets say if someone does want to learn C++ what are some good resources out there that someone can consume, considering video courses or even books
Does the Canvas api have support for webp?
Terraform is an amazing tool and it’s always great to see more infrastructure providers jumping on the bandwagon.
On YouTube I now watch all sorts of self-created producers. I stopped watching Netflix, etc., and just watch the self-made people. Substack is hosting the self-made journalists, and kudos to them (and Glenn).
I used the Quicktime Player screen-record feature in OS X. Though thanks for the rec.

Here's another one I like when I want my face and audio in: Screenity https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity (very easy code to work with too).
> Given that the main software is AGPL, the extensions would also be open source.

This is not necessarily true. If you are the sole copyright owner, you can have your main product be AGPL and sell proprietary extensions; there's no reason why you need to enforce your copyright against yourself. Alternatively, your combined product could be under a proprietary license that is not the AGPL.
Well... if a school's purpose is not education... What is it?
Age of the Essay
The reason your logic doesn't work out is because the assumptions you put in place are counterfactual.

What is factual is that the nuclear industry has been around for many decades and has not been able to solve this problem, despite there being lots of pretty clever people involved in it.

A contributing factor to making the learning curve negative is that the security guarantees underlying the plant designs are built on what we know can go wrong. As we learn more about the problem, we also learn of more weird failure modes, complicating the design of future plants.

I've seen people handwave this away with paper designs. Paper designs are comparatively easy to make safe. Real reactors are much, much harder. If you think this is bullshit, try looking up a certain admiral Rickover and see what he has to say about this.

Meanwhile, renewables keep falling in price.
Check out this extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1162/emoji-selector/

It implements a system level emoji keyboard that you can trigger with <Super + e>. It works pretty great and on all apps, I use it a lot.
would love this to use some microformat or machine readable standards
Yes, and those really highlight what the problem in the West is. The cost of nuclear has nothing to do with the physical construction, safety, or operation of Nuclear.

The costs are caused by legal challenges that cause massive delays and interruptions to construction, the transport of fuel and spent fuel, and to storage. There are egregious regulations that place unreasonable and outdated requirements on nuclear plant construction and operation.

Nuclear isn't a science or engineering problem. It's a political and legal problem.
I've anecdotally heard from former colleagues that it's gotten tougher to find entry-level or mid-level positions, not sure how broadly that applies, though.
A Drone Went Bowling. Hollywood Noticed
If they can actually measure such tiny blips then they can build particle detectors that might answer all sorts of fundamental problems. Such detectors would be exponentially smaller (read cheaper) than those in LHC-class colliders. There are no double many Nobel prizes up for grabs to anyone who can measure the gravity of particle flux.
I suppose my comment lacked a bit of nuance, as I understand the author may be in a different sector and certainly different geographic location.

Where I live (and the areas I am able/willing to transfer to), the job market has proven quite difficult. But, it could also be that my resume isn't to par, or a lack of effective networking, or both. That's why I'd be interested in seeing the perspective from someone who is obviously having success landing interviews.
Definitely not. I don't feel comfortable with the idea. It also really cramps my style if I decide I want to stay home one day.
Chess position evaluation is always going to be somewhat subjective and statistical. Electronics simulation is neither; it's physics.
Outside of HN I have never heard or seen anyone talk or write about Mastodon. For the general pubic, it doesn't exist.
I didn’t replace the switches. They’re additional. The smart switch and the dumb switch both work. One great advantage is you can use a greater variety of bulbs and due to this fixture positioning is much more flexible. You can turn on 20 bulbs at once if you like. Make zones in your house. Turn on the whole house at once. Timers, programmed changes etc etc
As this point, it's practically a meme.

I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these devices in over 5 years. Not one - and they boot from SD cards!

The stuff running on the RPis isn't very write heavy, and the cases are only lightly ruggedised (I forget the brand, but they are consumer gear, nothing fancy), and I forget what brand the SD cards are - but this is why I roll my eyes every time this is mentioned on HN (which is every time RPi is mentioned on HN). I really wonder what fraction of people repeating this reliability claim even have an RPi.
> They had paid for that right.

The terms of that domain ownership included the possibility of losing it in the manner described. The buyer knew those terms and implicitly agreed to them at time of purchase. It's all perfectly libertarian.

Or do you think you know better, and want to limit what kinds of contracts/ownership terms people can enter? And enforce those limits with men with guns?