skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why Sex Is Mostly Binary but Gender Is a Spectrum

I’m not going to quote problematic points expressed in the introduction, but I want to provide additional context for “mostly binary”, which is somewhat misleading. Biological sex characteristics are also a spectrum, but with most people falling close to one of two points on that spectrum.

It’s fairly commonly known that a small but significant portion of the population is intersex, having prominent characteristics from “both” sexes. While this is often explained as anomalous, it’s only by degree.

I hope saying this is enough to encourage anyone reading my comment to not take my word for it, but to read this biologist’s Twitter thread[1] explaining in much greater detail than I could do justice, or rolled up by Thread Reader[2] for convenience as it’s lengthy.

I know this isn’t a popular format here, but even being familiar with the concept I found the thread very illuminating when I read it around the time it was posted and it’s a common reverence I use when this topic comes up.

[1]: https://twitter.com/sciencevet2/status/1035246030500061184?s...

[2]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1035246030500061184.html
It's way more business-oriented and has more advanced pipelines and integrations.
Oh, this segues nicely from my DST, my favorite bikeshedding topic into my second favorite one!

Base 12 is better than decimal in every way. It divides cleanly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. Compare that to decimal, where you have 1, 2, 5, 10. It's much better for scheduling. With decimal you couldn't have a nice, clean schedule for a factory with 3 shifts per day for example. 60 minutes (which is a multiple of 12) gives you a lot of ways to break up an hour, vs 100 minutes.

I had a friend once rant about how we should switch everything to base 12. It's obviously crazy given the effort vs reward, but I think we would have been better off to have done so way back when.
>bitcoin power consumption actually increases because an increase in efficiency means more money if similar rates of power are consumed, except this also has the side effect of increasing mining difficulty, thus making the entire network more energy hungry overall

well not really, the amount of bitcoin to be mined is fixed (and actually drops in the long term), so the amount of money that is up for grabs should stay the same unless the price changes. Therefore it's more reasonable to say that the increase is power consumption is fueled by the increase in price, not because of increase in efficiency.
Make a law that all designs of failed airline companies are open-sourced to their competitors, so that parts can still be produced.
I don't know about what's currently used as state-of-the-art PEDs, but in theory there could very well be PEDs that are near impossible to detect, by being very quickly absorbed by the target tissue from the bloodstream. If they then also completely metabolize the drug to substances that occur normally in you body (and at non-suspicious levels), it would be very hard to detect.
Please hype responsibly: talking complex systems with Gemma Milne [audio]
It’s probably easier to change behavior that’s arbitrarily done twice a year (changing clocks) than to change institutions (schools, corporations)
> It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold.

I feel like the big argument here is that it is often not clear. Maybe a scroll bar "wastes" too much space, but watching mobile device users you can sort of see there needs to be some sort of system-wide scroll indicator. A lot of mobile users have nervous habits/tics of randomly scrolling every screen of every application they use. It doesn't waste a lot of time in a day, but it makes everyone look nervous or mentally ill and it's a bunch of papercuts better interface design could solve.

When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view. A lot of people found that aesthetically displeasing for whatever reasons, but it certainly was a good scroll indicator. Even mobile devices could use something to avoid the "random swipe syndrome" that seems to plague mobile users.
I felt the same way as well, but you know what they say: all publicity is good publicity. If you parrot the same thing over and over, some people may get interested, why other people are so angry....it's because they are nocoiners.
Anyone who’s been involved with crypto for more than a month or tried to help people to sign their email with PGP knows how often people lose their keys even when access to fungible cryptocurrencies is on the line.

So what happens to the shoes I want to sell if I lose my private key or it is stolen (probably more likely than someone stealing the physical shoes)?

Do I simply lose the right to sell? Or do I go to jail for not being able to prove that I own them? What if the person I’m selling the shoes to believes me or doesn’t care?

What is the real cost of stolen or fraudulent goods to the shoe market in percentage terms? Does it justify all of these extra transaction costs being layered on the honest shoe traders?

Are there probably good reasons that the idiom, “possession is 9/10ths of the law” is so common?
Regardless of everything, I always start by clicking the comments link on front page, and I end up reading either the comments or comments + article.

Often I read the comments first. Sometimes you can glance over the comments and if all the comments say "it's not like this" I will probably skip the article.

Also there's surprisingly huge amount of knowledge and anecdotes in the comments, and often they have higher information density.

Unfortunately each day I click 3x more links on HN than I have time to read through, so I don't always end up reading the article (which ends up in an ever-growing to-read list)
Network code tends to be performance critical, so the more you can fit into a cache line the better. Exact numbers depend on the application, of course, but those memory overheads can give you a very serious performance hit in cache-heavy applications.
Exponential growth is promised to investors, to entice investors into giving money to a company.

Sometimes, shares and options are offered to workers (very common in SV), but honestly I'd probably take the cash most of the time. The promise of future money is best left for rich folk who can afford to lose that pile of money.

For workers like me (and probably you), the cash deal is better. If you disagree, feel free to work for a myriad of startups who are offering stock instead of cash.

But yeah, its an option. Not an option I'd personally bet on... but if you really wanted to be rewarded in shares instead of money, the opportunity for that is all over the place.
I'd do what I always do when we shift our UTC offset: mentally add or subtract to get to the real time until I finally stop being lazy.
Sure, but hopefully you're capable of doing something else.

Most knowledge workers need to upskill over their career. Whether you're a mechanical engineer or an accountant, there's a very good chance that your job looks different today than it did in 2011 or 2001 (or, if you're old enough, 1991). It's much easier for a knowledge worker to learn one new skill and combine it with their other existing skills, and be able to leverage that into a new career.
Whenever something related to Elon Musk comes up it becomes hard to sort out what is a reasonable claim versus an unreasonable one fueled by a parasocial relationship with Elon Musk.
I mean, of course they have a point. Some of them are going to win. Some of them have won big.

The thing is, I don't think the winners are mostly getting rich off the backs of short sellers. They are getting rich off the backs of other retail investors, most of whom are losing money, because they buy in at $220, hold through $300, and then diamond hands the drop to $50.

I understand why people with an exit plan are screaming at everyone else to hold. They need everyone else to hold, so that their exit pays off. This is why I assume they are spreading FUD, and misinformation about how short sales work.
> There's jellyfish that literally do not die from old age ever.

"Biological immortality" is an equivocation. Immortality is not dying, "not aging" is not immortality as, for instance, those jellyfish definitely die. Even if we stopped humans biologically aging and cured all diseases the universe will still find a way to kill us even if we sidestep all the causes until the universe itself dies of heat death.
I have no idea why this factual and obviously logical comment is grey, but I did my part to help make sure it doesn’t get buried.
Hilarious.

I had forgotten gestures. I paid for Opera for years because I loved mouse gestures so much. Now I'm back to moving my cursor all the way back to the top left to hit a back button. I don't know what happened.
IFTTT kinda gave up in comparison to Zapier - zapier has so many api/service/framework/tool interfaces where IFTTT kinda just went niche with home automation and basic stuff beyond that.

For example, with IFTTT the RSS trigger is pretty stupid but with zapier you can trigger based on parsed fields with values and triggers on those values...

I had hoped that Zapier would put some pressure on IFTTT to do more but it seems like they're comfortable focusing on IoT/basics/appliances
I mean, you could just as well say Bitcoin isn't actually transferring money, it's just changing whose private keys are able to move a token around. If you define "money" as something you can pay your rent, taxes, and grocery expenses with, Coinbase and the exchanges are the ones that really settle that into money.
Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1. A flip flop in a chip might be metastable and you can't tell if it's a 0 or a 1. So should you then conclude bits in a CPU's registers are not binary because there are edge cases where the flip flops are metastable? Or should you conclude they are "binary 99%+ of the time" which is to say "mostly binary"?

It's useful to recognize the exceptions that exist, but let's not split hairs over the semantics of "mostly".
Ah neat, so you were an NCR tech! (I peeked at your comment history a bit.) My team and broader department spent a lot of hours working with, sometimes not in the most friendly terms, people at different levels in the NCR organization.

You're correct, if Drake (the always running discovery engine) didn't detect a device on a given port over a long enough time, then another program would shut that port down. This was nominally done for PCI compliance, but of course having open, un-used ports especially in the field is just a terrible security hole in general.

In order to support legit equipment moves, we created a number of tools that the NOC and I believe Field Support could use to re-open ports as needed. I think we eventually made something that authorized in-store people could use too.

As an aside, a port being operationally 'up' wasn't by itself sufficient for us mark the port as being legitimately used. We had to see traffic coming from it as well.

You mentioned elsewhere that you're working with a big, legacy Perl application, porting it to Python. 99% of the software my team at WalMart built was in Perl. (: I'd be curious to know, if you can share, what company/product you were working on.
> In every place I've worked, a major project has been replacing a grey forms application with every screen so stuffed with information even users who sit and use the software every day are confused by it.

That's just one big exercise in burning money. The end result of these major projects is software that is significantly less efficient to use.

Information density is good. Seamlessly filtering out irrelevant things and focusing on important ones, and switching these filters on the fly, is the one thing human visual system is good at. Information density plays to our natural strengths. Meanwhile, our working memory is limited, so splitting things into multiple screens plays into our weaknesses.

When you replace an information- and functionality-rich screen with a bunch of sparse screens connected by buttons, doing everything takes longer - there's extra operations, a switch delay in the UI, and working memory delays. This scales with use - so when talking about software used every day by salaried employees, that's literally setting company dollars on fire. People do their jobs slower, doing less work, getting increasingly frustrated, wasting time they could spend on something else[0]. It's hard to see such major projects as anything else than sabotage.

Yes, information-dense software has steeper learning curve. But that's a solved problem - people using such software at work are usually trained in using it. They get leveled-up to proficient very fast. Information-sparse software doesn't even offer the option of becoming a proficient user, because there's nothing to skill up in (except patience for loading screens).

--

[0] - or watching cat videos, or doing personal stuff, or chilling out - ways of keeping sane and improving morale, which raises overall productivity too.
Or they don't understand why its a good habit and so follow the advice blindly, not knowing when to skip it or not. Breadth of experience.
(author here) Mecha looks really nice!

One difference that makes Mecha's look really nice/simple is they are being built at compile time, whereas the ones I outline in this blog post are being built at runtime (with the intention of later building parsers at runtime _based on other parsers output_.

Or, at least that's what I gleaned from a quick skim of Mecha. Very excited to play around with it soon!
The deflationary bit (emission rate halving every 4 years) is also responsible for mining revenues dropping, meaning less money to be spent on electricity.
Apple phones have ad blocking, at least in the browser. Isn't there something for Android?

Although yes ads are still an issue inside apps.
Exactly! They should follow the route Gab took build a solid web app.
Not what I expected when I clicked onto it. I was going to go on a rant about how much I hate the "monolith at any cost" crowd at the moment.
"To raise the quality of discussion..."

To raise the quality of discussion, we need for all the email and Signal messages from the investors / VCs for a variety of deals to be made public. That would be a major step towards reducing the amount of information arbitrage in start-up funding (not to mention blog posts like the OP).
I absolutely love parser combinators, and years ago I did a huge rewrite of my compiler compiler so that it'd have the easiest possible parser combinators: simple string concatenation. grammarA + grammarB = grammarC. You can play with that here (https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/). You still need to make a line change or two (good design after all, requires some integration), but it just works. Haven't seen anything beat it and not sure if that's possible. (Note: I do apologize for the crappy UX, and it's high on the priority list to give the app a refresh)
Immink says the myth is that Sony exec Ohga's wife insisted on the 74 minute length, based on a very slow performance of Beethoven 9, which normally isn't that long. But he also says it's not true. This is in his classic paper on the history of the CD.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_B...
Europe's large web hosting provider knocked offline following fire
As does selective indifference.
I'm not sure it is begging the question, at least not if framed properly.

The question seems to be to be "what exact criteria categorises what is commonly meant when people talk about what is alive". I think you could interpret OP as claiming that there is an idea of artificial or alien life as presented in science fiction which people would commonly describe as life but may not replicate.
I skimmed some Linux code the other day and noticed that goto is used for more than those two situations. Maybe just cruft...?

Search for retry: or handle_itb: in https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/ext4/resize...

Or fixleft: or copy: in https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d158fc7f36a25e19791d2...
Also, we run on platforms like iOS, where we have very severe memory constraints (the NetworkExtension is allowed 15MiB of total RAM). Given that we juggle a lot of IP-related data types, even modest optimizations help.

That said, I'd think of the size thing as more of a constraint on the other desired features. We wanted the other nice things (less GC pressure, no allocations, comparable type...) while also being _lean enough_ that there's no reason not to use the netaddr types.
Sounds like Paul Erdős had it figured out...

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Erdos

> Erdős would show up—often unannounced—on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare “My brain is open!” and stay as long as his colleague served up interesting mathematical challenges.

(More anecdotes here: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/ho...)
It wasn't this bad in early 2013 when the price of BTC was $70. Actually pg's comments here persuaded me to buy a lot of Bitcoin (with a few other influential people, like Chamath Palihapatiya and Max Keiser, and the Cyprus bail in). Usually I missed all the good early startup investments, as I'm not an American, so Bitcoin was the first exciting thing that I had the ability to invest in early.
Very interesting insights here - thank you. I think you could write an extended version of this post as a very engaging blog article (maybe with some example screenshots), if you were ever so inclined :)
Discussed at the time:

Decoded: GNU Coreutils - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20328650 - July 2019 (55 comments)
Comedians desperate for any kind of hit, regardless of ideology. The author imagines this is "satire", but it's pretty ham-fisted.

The title is OK, though omitting "Graciously" would fit the notion of "Pretending to be a news article" better. The first sentence is pretty good.

It quickly goes off the rails. "89 hour Twitter marathon" isn't funny; it's just random. It's too long to seem realistic, so you're telling two jokes at once (one trying to tee up the actual joke of the article, the other one exaggerating).

Having Musk actually say "brain dead psychopath" is the wrong tone; it's negative where it should be positive. "The world needs another eccentric..." lands because it's positive, but the rest of the next sentence is just a rant.

It then gives up any pretense of actually being a news article and just rags on Trump.

It's not that I like Trump. Exactly the opposite. I'm just pointing out that "Trump is bad" isn't satire. Satire would be "Trump is good" in a way that makes it clear that he's actually bad.

The point being... who "disses both the left and the right?" A satirist who thinks that "dissing" is funny.

If you're after satire that really does do a better job on both sides, try theonion.com. Of course they're still leaning pretty heavily into the right, partly because that's their proclivity, but mostly because they've been fed so much good material.

But they're also hitting Cuomo, Senate Democrats, and Biden. That one is an especially good example:

https://politics.theonion.com/biden-comforts-families-of-syr...

That's spinning a negative thing (air strikes) as if it were positive. That hits you much harder than simply ranting at them. Similarly, the best piece against the right ("CDC Launches Ad Campaign Featuring Racist Mascot In Effort To Get More Conservatives Vaccinated") twists in the middle (i.e. not about the CDC or the vaccines at all). That's cleverness.

Er, sorry for the rant. You asked. There is a good bit of satire to be written about how Musk's twitter somehow fills a needed niche vacated by Trump, but that's not it. Maybe something more akin to "Area man complains, 'Elon Musk Twitter Feed Just Not As Good, But It Will Have To Do'".
Besides the sibling pointing out to Cloudflare Access, there is also a new way that allows for arbitrary TCP traffic to be routed through Cloudflare network in a Zero Trust fashion: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/tutorials/w...
Until you turn on the computer and receive electricity bill?
TBH I love the skepticism here. It's important to think about metrics critically in this way to make sure we're building truly useful applications of data.

We've found that evaluating individuals, stack ranking teams, and measuring an individual's 'productivity' to be an ultimately futile effort.

It's more important to focus on team delivery as described in many research studies. My favorite being the book Accelerate by nicole forsgren. If you haven't, I do encourage you to check it out!

As the founder of Haystack I can be seen as biased so its probably more helpful to checkout their research across thousands of teams on what makes an 'elite engineering team' and how elite engineering teams ultimately help drive successful organizations across profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction :)
Well, to some extent it is. You can argue both ways, and in Zapier's case, I'd say it's overvalued as the 10-15 range assumes obtaining a monopoly. I don't see how Zapier will do that since there's also IFTTT and other services I've tried.

With that said, consider huge successes like Amazon. Huge successes like Amazon have been generating much more profit compared to what they were projected to earn in 2010 [1]. I picked 2010 since 2 things are out of the way: the tech boom and the credit crunch. Moreover, people understood that Amazon was here to stay. Despite that, 10 years later, they make 20 times as much profit. If investors knew that 10 years ago, I'd bet that the price would not have been about 130$ since according to Google Finance, the diluted earnings per share (EPS) is about 42$, which is about 30% of the 2010 stock price.

Mind you, in 2010, investors already put crazy multiples on stocks like Amazon. Yet, their prediction on how much money it would make has been underestimated back then. If the estimates of 2010 were correct, you'd expect Amazon to now have an EPS of like 6.5$ (130/20) since by conservative measures, the P/E ratio is in the 15-25 range.

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, I'm not the sharpest cookie in the jar.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...

[2] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=MAX
This is article is pretty light on details. There may be many reasons for the recent spat of records (most of the ones mentioned, btw, are regional), but the shoes are definitely a big contributor.

It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip.

Myself, and virtually every competitive runner that I know at the amateur level, has invested in so called "super shoes" from one of the various manufacturers, with impressive (relative) results- generally, everyone has PR'd since the switch. Aside from that small sample set, numerous other studies have shown that the shoes deliver:
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-v...
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z

At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.
Shorts cost money to maintain, you can get margin called and lose everything, and the upside of shorting a $15 stock at $50, when it occasionally balloons up to $300 is... Not great.