skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Digital Control Systems. Do I need this?

Yes, you do.

"Control" is another name for "optimisation" or "systems with feedback".

It is the theory covering any system that has a closed loop in it. Optimisation is a mindbogglingly broad field with application to nearly everything in the physical world. Other branches of engineering, science and maths study this area but give it their own name.

Examples of systems with cycles:

* Any system that does optimisation: Deep learning, adaptive systems, ...

* Error control decoders in digital communications systems.

* The majority of non-trivial circuits.

* Pretty well every circuit operating at high frequencies.

* Echo cancellers in telecoms.

* Computer networks (eg. TCP congestion control)

* Systems of chemical reactions

* The brain (your area of interest) is a seething mass of feedback paths.

Optimisation (a.k.a. Control Theory) and Information Theory (some of which is covered under the name Communications Theory) are fundamentals. "Digital" in their title doesn't mean they have narrow application, as Information Theory (Shannon, ...) treats everything, including analogue, in terms of bits.

Given your background in maths, one of the first things you should do is to try to construct a "Rozetta Stone" to relate a complete list of Electrical Engineering topics back to what you already know. For example, you will have already done a lot of control theory, but have learned it as optimisation. Part of your task is to recast your existing knowledge in terms of EE jargon, identify the gaps, then fill them in. Unlike an undergraduate you're not starting from the bottom.

Edit:

A suggestion: Along with the list of EE areas you want to learn, why not add to your post a list of all the areas you already know in maths? HN readers may be able to link the areas that you want to learn with what you already know. It's hard to make such links yourself, as you don't yet know what each EE topic contains.
1. Time from colander to sauce is under a minute for me. How long is it for you that this matters?

2. Make exactly the amount of pasta you need for the meal. No leftovers to store.
At that point, why have 1,200 people in a single company? Why not have each team hire each other team as contractors?

(This isn't sarcasm, I actually do vaguely suspect the world would be a better place if we did this.)
The other one:

"DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10432608
haha, that's not a visual programming language!
No company at that scale will function without people taking care of all the HR and IT functions. Sure it doesn't have to be traditional, there doesn't have to be a department responsible for it, but it has to be done - and you need a lot of manpower to do it. Hence why you usually have departments dedicated for those tasks. You might call it something different or distribute their responsibilities down the chain but it will still exist.

Makes for a good headline though, who doesn't hate HR and IT...

...always getting in our way of running random code on our machines or coming to work without pants /s
What are you supposed to do if the 40 year old woman really was doing something wrong though? I realize in this instance she wasn't, but what if she wasn't a consummate professional capable of anything the company needed but just thought she was?
HR’s closest department in responsibility is Legal, both serve to protect the company, not its employees. So I can see the argument that you don’t need HR if you have a legal department, have it train managers to handle employee grievances properly, and let each manager deal with vacations, sick leave etc as they see fit.

And finance can handle ordering computer equipment and network management services, get rid of IT as well.
This matches my understanding as well. The CEO (at the time) was on a podcast and specifically said they were moderating/deleting the posts. AWS just wanted it to be done faster (in an automated fashion).
According to Linkedin there are 25 HR employees at his company Octopus Energy. Their roles are Learning & Development, Talent Acquisition, Onboarding, Payroll Management. These are all roles that are typically taken on by the HR department.

He has an HR department whether he calls it like that or not.
It's also a good way to get slapped with lawsuits from decisions made by people who don't understand FMLA leave.
It’s not like these instruction were ‘secret instructions’ reserved for use by a secret cabal. They’re just leftovers from ‘don’t care’ parts of the microcode. I remember there’s quite a few that simply hang the processor because their microcode doesn’t include the ‘increase the program counter’ instruction so it turns into an infinite loop.
I've still got this on one of my old hard drives, it's something like 150kb if I recall. Really quite amazing.
Good luck Greg
Well... there are two types of people.

Those who do backups and those who will...

Seriously, I can't imaging doing something like research or writing PhD thesis and not having at least one off-site backup.

Just get yourself couple of pendrives and rotate them somewhere else than where you live and work.

I personally have more data. For my backup needs I use 3 4TB drives, a USB HDD docking station and a script to detect when one of the drives is inserted and make backup of data from all places in my home that I need backed up.

I have one drive inserted in the station (once inserted, it will attempt one backup per day). One standing by or in transit and one with the family.

At any point in time at least one of those drives is safe with my family which I visit regularly. When I drive there I yank the backup drive from the station, immediately replace it with the standby drive and take the fresh backup with me. When I am going back home, I take the one drive that was previously kept by my family to use it as a standby.

It is not complicated, you can do the same with a pendrive.

There is no paid software involved, I wrote the script over the years but it is simple and has no extra features. It only detects when the drive is inserted (each has a file with info), makes full/incremental backups (full backup automatically after inserted, incremental every night) and removes old backups and linked increments as needed. Restore is manual as files are just tar.
His managers handle that for their own employees.
Anecdotal but I know someone who works on the software engineering team at Octopus, and in their experience there’s way too much micromanagement, and minimal empowerment from engineers to apply their own judgment.

the point being that narrative and reality are not the same thing.
Advice is great, but you can’t become a great mountain biker just by buying the right gear. Great riders on $500 Craigslist specials will run circles around amateurs on a $10,000 top of the line bike.

The point is that you can follow in someone’s footsteps, but you have to do the work. You can’t simply pretend to imitate people or their mannerisms or their gear and expect the same results.
> How to make sense of a proof

> When you finish you should know why each step follows from what came before. You may not see how anyone could have thought to do the proof that way, but you should be able to see that it is correct.

Knowing that something is true is not the same as knowing why it is true.

I don't know what the problem is with understanding, but here's three thoughts:

1. You need a deeper level understanding - you can't understand a problem at the same level you encountered it. Perhaps, understanding different but related areas, so you see the same problem from a different perspective. Perhaps understanding the formal system that is used to define terms used in the problem description.

2. You need familiarity, which creates the feeling of "intuition". If you know how it behaves in all situations, you will feel you understand it, even if you don't. So, just lots of practice/exercises.

3. You need to fully understand the components from which the problem is formed. For example, the natural numbers and addition, and build up from there.
Do not EVER believe that HR is there for you.

Ever.
What do businesses use to collect shipping information at checkout?
I am wondering if there is something similar to Stripe but for collecting shipping information and buying the postage label.

I am assuming that businesses use some kind of external shipping API and design the UI to collect shipping information themselves.

I am just wondering if there's already a product that streamlines this process?
Another thought I had...

There are plenty of cases where brutal militaries who dehumanized people have worked out great for the parent countries. Early Americans abused and abused and exterminated native Americans and is now a super power. Mao's armies used similar tactics to take China and is also a super power. Britain build a global empire of oppression and abuse. Although their empire is gone, they still reap the benefits of their colonial oppression and atrocities today.
Your privilege is showing.

I think that the thing to keep in mind here is that HR, like legal, isn't for when things are going well. This comment sort of assumes that you'll never have a harassment problem, nobody will ever have an issue with getting their FMLA "approved", and the company will never have a performance problem that requires letting someone go in a way that won't get you sued.

These things all happen, and there's a lot of No True Scotsmanning in the idea that they only happen to bad companies/people.

Edit: I don't like HR either, but I'm very unlikely to need them to keep my boss from harassing me.
Recently I migrated off Whatsapp like many others and the Linux desktop experience is really good, in particular the performance of search impressed me. Compared to the Whatsapp Web client it is much faster. If I'm not mistaken it's a Qml + Qt app which is actually very pleasant to write. Not sure why not more stuff is built with it these days.
I’ll counter argue that IT and HR sap enough productivity out of the workforce that the work they do is a net negative.
That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. All it takes is one bonehead. Not even a bonehead really, I don't want to try to maintain any semblance of technical acumen in my role and take care of the folks that I support and know all the intricacies of labor-related laws and standards.
Impostor Hunting: Why 9 Out of 10 Product Team Members Are Redundant (2015)
People with purchasing power want trucks. Sell them Cybertrucks.
So, they're manager and HR.
When you only have a hammer...
I've found this happened naturally for me in terms of smaller mannerisms and phrases or silly voices. Nothing load bearing, mind. That's all hard work and self discovery.
Thanks but no. Managers have their favorites. As young single male I am always expected to pick up the slack for lazy colleagues without compensation. I will take my chances with HR.
LaTeX users: is it ecen possible to bot code?
Yeah, we don't get to find out because they don't supply any examples of problems anywhere in the article.
Spot on, not sure who would down vote this factual statement.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't think world leaders like the US president should use Twitter.

- Unlike traditional media where you have several competing outlets to disseminate your message, everything you put out on that platform is subject to the censorship whims of a single corporation.

- It doesn't feel very presidential. 140 or 280 or whatever characters seems like an artificial cap on what is presumably very important messaging for the country. (You may argue people don't have an appetite for more - I guarantee when politics comes up in conversation over a backyard BBQ most people have a lot more to say than that).
We have an app for that.
Not having an HR department doesn't mean you don't have HR and no one is claiming that. The entire point is that you don't need a department to do those things and the argument presented here is that those responsibilities are left integrated within a team rather than compartmentalized into a separate and independent system.
Reunification meant that Germany's power in the EU increased. Becoming a bigger country with a larger population got more seats and pushed the bloc more in its direction. Thus reducing Britain's influence there.
Obligatory Andrew Ucles tutorial on cats:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cTV6mKV6oE
I guess we'll never know :(
And a 3D aluminum cast should be way stiffer than steel sheets used so far, so it should be less likely to get a bent frame this way.
There's nothing inherently profitable about abuse. Making your workers miserable generally makes them less productive.

The thing with banks is that they aren't productive in the first place. They're scalping off whatever they can get, with fierce competition. If you're fresh out of college and get hired into these places, you can't just walk away without risking your whole career. It's a monopsony. That's what
enables abuse, human nature takes care of the rest.
What makes HR immune to having 'boneheads' in any other company? If your risk is 'someone might be a bonehead' then having HR as a separate department doesn't help does it?
> Yes, I can't fathom why the hate is on the law, and not the companies now being exposed by the law.. Seriously, if you don't do shady shit your site doesn't need a popup asking for consent.

What problem do you believe is being solved by the popup? The idea that it will get consumers to boycott garbage websites and internet services (read: the vast majority) is wishful thinking. Consumers do not care in the slightest and just want to be cool and fit in and use the same thing as everyone else. Anyone who is tunnel visioned on web privacy (which doesn't and will never exist, due to how webcrap is built) will go to the bottom of the page and click "privacy policy". Websites shouldn't have means of collecting data about you at all in the first place. Banking and shopping should be done with software instead of insecure web scripts. Yes smaller steps can be taken but there is such thing as too small.

EDIT: Oh I think you're saying that the popup is indeed redundant because your website shouldn't have it because if it does your website is crap. I agree, but I don't agree with the law since I still use those websites regarldess of how trash they are and all the popup does is make it more annoying.
That’s crazy that you think that HR would do anything other than back up your biased manager to the hilt.
* Except a few giant rodents they largely stay away from
Ok, so now you understand what the article is saying. No HR department.
do it :

https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning
Since many comments here says how Apple's own apps have the same problems, that wouldn't do any difference even if the app store was actually curated for quality and not control.
> But then if they aren't, why hasn't a better optimal system replaced it?

Because we’re not living at the limit of infinity and this discussion is there to change this fact
In-house development been influenced too much by GitHub open source PR process
Legal can vet guidelines for the company, you don’t need a whole HR department to implant them, or anything.
Addiction is a disease of the brain, not a mental health issue.
A Brief History of Semiconductors: How the US Cut Cost and Lost the Leading Edge
Author here, you are indeed correct that Query #2's final join can be an INNER join. However, I just tested it against our test data set and it makes no impact on the performance.
Nearly everyone also works for a living, or depends on someone who works for a living. Would you also argue on that same basis that strong labor protections, and high wages are better for nearly everyone?

If you intend to cite negative second and third order effects as a counterargument - have you considered whether or not any negative second and third order effects might be applicable to yours?
Auto layout is still pretty terrible and used sparingly.

I would guess it’s more 30 years improvement in CAD - it’s easier to keep fiddling with the layout until you make it work than it used to be.
They're gonna need a union.
I'd like to see how it performs on trivial instances like a NxM grid of points (perhaps with small perturbations).
Ok, turns out he likes privacy after all. Don’t lie please.
I think it's a bit of a pessimistic take, to be sure, but I do agree that most people will not make it through this in a self-directed manner. Sure, some may, and I wish the OP the best and hope it all works out, but it's hard for most people to tackle much simpler, straightforward topics in a self-learning environment.

In this case, though, I think OP's approach to this shows that they're serious about keeping with it, which is really cool to see.
That looks like someone bundled a prepacked browser-like starter-package using Emacs compiled with GTK-widgets (WebView) with Helm and some other niceties like the status-bar.

It even uses the same terminology with words like “buffers” instead of tabs.

Is this actually an Emacs-based browser being shipped to the masses?
It sounds like you think HR la job is to prevent harassment, instead of protecting the company against employees who claim harassment.
Not sure that this has it quite right, but something along these lines (redux-like, but integrated with immer seems like a good idea). Perhaps it could also could also use TypeScript to cut down on "action creator" boilerplate?
It's like microservices: the company, with all the downsides that come from higher transaction latencies between component parts.

Economics of scale would also be lost, if you had to do all the book keeping, IRS reporting, etc etc for 120 companies of 10, instead of one company of 1200.
BREAKING NEWS

Massive Fire Raging at Pasta Factory in San Bixenino

March 20, 2045

A massive fire is raging out of control at the MegaFoodGrpInc Pasta factory on Foodstuffs Avenue this evening. Fire department officials report being hampered by the presence of eldritch inter-dimensional entities, as well as water supply problems related to non-functional fire hydrants in the area.

San Bixenino FD spokesbot XJa32l/14 reports that mutual aid has been called in from all over California, and fire-fighting operations are now in a defensive mode.

/14 adds "These new exotic materials they are using in foodstuff remodulation today burn longer and hotter than ever before. We've cautioned them about buying supplies from Nyarlathotep before, but they just don't listen."

No bot or firefighter injuries have been reported so far.
Finlo: 22K+ upvotes on Reddit. Buit for us, not Wall St.
Hey everyone,

I’m Marco, co-founder and CEO of FINLO.

A little over a month ago I decided to share on Reddit a spreadsheet I built to track and analyze stocks. I posted it across the major investing subreddits and it really blew up. 22k+ upvotes, thousands of comments, and continuous PM’s filling my inbox requesting new features.

This is what gave birth to FINLO. We are building an investment research platform with premium data and tools built to empower retail investors.
It’s going to be subscription based with two plans catering different investor types. Our goal is to launch by mid-April.

The idea is to continuously crowdsource ideas and features from the investment community in order to build tools and provide data they actually want. We will continue adding more data and tools as soon as we launch in April.

If you’d like to learn more about FINLO and signup to our waitlist you can do so at: https://finlo.io

Our Discord community will serve as a space to talk all things-investing and help make FINLO the best investment platform possible.

You can join our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/JpxancWDxu

Finlo: Built for us, not Wall St.
You have a legal department to guide you on legal issues, from harassment to mandated leave.
This is a terrible idea in the current state of the tech industry, where plenty of highly skilled tech specialists are “promoted” to positions managing people, without the training or emotional intelligence to handle what an HR department can handle.
Nothing stops them using the software to build the prototype of the presentation to start their work from and then add some human language on top. 90% hours off that, and nobody will ever tell too.
Not if your USB ports were disabled by Group Policy you can’t.
I was wondering the same thing. What would a few bullets through that huge air tube do to your power?

I recently had a pressure leak on my turbocharged car on the air intake between the turbo and the block. It seriously wrecked the performance. The engine was close to stalling and my gas mileage dropped by half. These big radials aren't quite as picky, but I bet you'd still feel the difference.
> Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management.

This is where you should anticipate the upper management saying no and then just never ask, using an excuse that “you thought that wouldn’t be such a big issue”
I'm after the point that continuous==analog, and therefore impossible on a digital system.
This is a bit confusing, it doesn't seem like there are any tests of Teslas at all after 2019. (https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/safest-family-ca...) and the Teslas are the best in 3 of 8 classes in the 2019 "Best in Class" cars list on their website, which is the most recent year available.

It does seem there were changes to the tests in 2020, but not 2021, and they say "2020 assessments differ significantly from previous years and star ratings should not be directly compared with those from earlier years."

So IDK, your comment seems misleading?
I’ve been thinking about something like this for a while now, glad to see it being worked on.

Could federated learning be used as a form of proof-of-work that actually yields valuable data rather than throwaway garbage?

Actually, looks like it’s already being done: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11745
To be fair, this is not data on your own PC or laptop where you know that the disk dies, the data is gone. You'd expect a IT setup by a professional university to have redundant backups for you, so that nothing could go wrong even if something breaks or gets deleted. But depends on the university of course, and it must be hard for students to know how qualified the IT department of their university is.
What's the best way to backup the actual sd card. I plan to store it on the cloud. I tried using Windisk 32 and it didn't work .
"Nerf rock" - Scissors
Is it me, or do these graphs have no x-axis labels or legends?

I’m guessing there’s a data set in there, but all I see are meaningless up and to the right graphs.
Neither German nor historian, but -

The Austro-Hungarian empire was considered to be a successor state and claimed the title for a time, and basically the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian empire were somewhat viewed as successors along protestant and catholic lines - unifying the division of the two under a 'new' ideology was a big part of third reich ideology (irrespective of how bad naziism was, this is a huge part of the history of the broader topic of 'german unification') .

This article mentions neither historical austria-hungary, the reformation, the anschluss, or modern day austria, so it seems more than a bit lacking from my perspective. But again, not a German nor a Historian so I could be missing something..
Don’t get me started on font sizes. I’m older now and theee designs hurt my eyes.

And on iOS if you use the system font and standard styles, text automatically adjusts to accessibility settings. So I always suggest that but every designer wants to “make their mark” with custom fonts that either font work with accessibility or require a bunch of extra coding that the product owner never gives time for.