skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've written the same sentence before! This is so cool! pardon the wall of text.

Here's my thesis, curious to hear your thoughts.

At some time around 2005, when efficient persistence and computation became cheap enough that any old f500-corp could afford to endlessly collect data forever, something happened.

Before 2005, if a company needed to make a big corporate decision, there was some data involved in making the decision, but it was obviously riddled with imperfections and aggregations biases.

Before 2005, executives needed to be seasoned by experience, to develop this thing we call "Good Judgement", that allows them to make productive inferences from a paucity of data. The Corporate Hierarchy was a contest for who could make the best inferences.

Post-2005, data collection is ubiquitous. Individuals and companies realized that you don't need to pay people with experience any more, you can simply collect better data, and outsource decision-making to interpretations of this data. The corporate hierarchy now is all about how can gather the "best" data, where "best" means grow the money pile by X% this quarter.

"Good Judgement" used to be expected from the CEO, down to at least 1-3 levels of middle management above the front-line people. Now, it appears (to me) to be mostly a feature of the C-Suite and Boards, and it's disappeared elsewhere. Long-term, high-performing companies seem to have a more diffused sense of good judgement. But these are rare. maybe they always have been?

Anyways, as we agree, this has a tendency to lead in problematic directions. Here's my thesis on "why".

Fundamentally, any "data" is reductive of human experience. It's like a photograph that captures a picture by excluding the rest of the world.

Few people seem to understand this analogy, because they think photographs are the ultimate record of an event. Lawyers understand this analogy. With the right framing, angle, lighting (and of course, with photoshop), you can make a photograph tell any story you want.

It's the same issue with data, arguably worse since we don't have a set of standard statistics. We have no GAAP-equivalent for data science (yet?).

Our predecessors understood that data was unreliable, and compensated for this fact by selecting for "Good Judgement". The modern mega-corps demonstrate that we don't have a good understanding of this today, evidenced by religious "data-driven" doctrine, as you describe.

People will say "hey! at least some data is better than no data!", to which I'll say data is useless and even harmful in lieu of capable interpreters. In 2021, have an abundance of data, but a paucity of people who are capable of critical interpretation thereof.

I don't know if it's a worse situation than we had 20 years ago. But it's definitely a different situation, that requires a new approach. I think people are taking notice of it, so I'm hopeful.
Bitcoin is good for cross-border payments and hedging inflation. See how Bitcoin has been used in Venezuela:

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research
Puzzled: I do not have a data science PhD. I have a huge number of years doing compiler code generators/binary translation retargeting. As such, I continue to be baffled as to why Python is a desired language - it is dynamic, with no capabilities to utilize 16-bit floats (such as used by Googles TPU, or GPU processors) And yet, ML and data science are so compute bound that it strikes me as unfortunate that an untyped language such as Python would be of any use at all as a Data Science tool base.
Please enlighten me!
Disclaimer: former EPAM employee (early 2010-s).

Such big* consulting/outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe(epam, globallogic and the like) have competent engineers.

I can see it especially clearly after moving to the US and having to interview engineers from other big consultancies.

*big - everything with several k employees is considered big in Eastern Europe.
I'm fond of FoundryVTT -- it allows for self-hosting if you don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee.

https://foundryvtt.com/
This is anecdata but I know a lot of people that AA has worked for (tens of years of sobriety) attribute a portion of their success and sanity on doing a daily gratitude list.
90% of the switch was because systemd made the distributions job much easier: it basically replaced a bunch of effort each distribution had to maintain themselves. There really was not a lot of political pressure as systemd opponents seem to imply.
There is a horrific waste of resources devastating the environment that has gone on for far too long without detection.

Hundreds of thousands of computer servers running almost 24/7, hundreds of thousands of people driving to work, burning energy on their development machines. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on making products (and wasting energy) to support this industry, which then must be transported, wasting more energy.

We must ban this scourge: entertainment!

This entertainment industry (TV shows, movies, podcasts, video games, etc. used primarily for entertainment) adds nothing and is unproductive.

/s

But not totally sarcasm. Maybe bitcoin isn't truly solving all the problems we hoped it could. Perhaps those problems will be solved by a better version, maybe Ethereum or some other cryptocurrency.

Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that energy isn't wasted in other parts of the economy. What's a "legitimate" use of energy? I think most Americans, generally protective of individual rights, would say let the market decide.

If Americans want to pay for TV shows, let the entertainment industry burn energy to give it to them.

If Americans want to buy/sell/transfer Bitcoin, whether to watch their "investment" go up and down in value, or for some other reason, let them.
That's more "freedom of association" than "freedom of speech". And yes, there are laws specifically governing legal and illegal discrimination in banking:

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0347-your-equal-credit...

Political affiliation is not a covered group, but I have no idea how the case law has been interpreted. It may be that a lot of political groups touch enough on a protected group that it would be forbidden to discriminate.

I'm sure there are other laws that allow (and maybe even require) discrimination against violent groups. But that's definitely out of my depth.
We are grey goo version 0.0.1!!! That is, life on Earth. Life has already become a solar powered self replicator that caused a global catastrophe, burying the whole Earth in a toxic gas.
I meant more the actual nuts-and-bolts of fiat currency, not the entire political structure of capitalism. Obviously this is an unanswerable question, but ultimately the point is that the current currency system no doubt consumes a huge amount of energy. If the predominant currency of the world were a Proof of Stake crypto, it seems logical to assume that actual energy costs would go way down.
Tesla/PG&E are also building 182.5MW/730MWh presumably at the same site?
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-moss-landing-instal...
Just to be clear, since the title is ambiguous, it's not "thanks to RMS" it's "to protect themselves from RMS"

> We formed a union to help protect ourselves from RMS — he controlled our pay, benefits, and workplace conditions.

> RMS did not believe in providing raises... RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.
>enough to power more than 7,000 homes

I get that this is used to quantify the energy capacity, but no homes are directly benefiting from this.
Considering that most hand sanitizer is simply alcohol + aloe gel - yes this makes sense, but aloe is in there for a reason (alcohol is incredibly harsh on your skin).
VS Code has never been sold to me as a lightweight text editor and I've only ever seen it coupled with atrocities of plugins for "developer productivity" that equates to do it the way the wizard in the corner created their environment to enforce or else feel their impotent wrath on your PRs.
Better than the neck brace we wear around our throats today.
I work in the cryptocurrency industry. I perceive Stephen as being 42% correct, yet so angry about it that it'll take him another decade, or more, to appreciate the other 58%.
Teen Girls Face Murder Charges for Uber Carjacking and Crash
I have a coupon site for developers https://www.gluee.com/
and a set of small tools for developers:

https://www.punycoder.com/ (a tool for Punycode to Text/Unicode and vice-versa conversion),

https://www.htmlwasher.com/ (a tool if you have some dirty HTML and need to clean it up),

https://www.htmlcorrector.com/ (a tool if you have some not so well-formed HTML and need to fix it),

https://www.htmlenc.com/ (a simple tool to HTML encode (escape) a text),

https://www.urlenc.com/ (a simple tool to URL encode (escape) a text),

https://www.gguid.com/ (a customizable GUID generator),

https://www.64baser.com/ (a Base64 and vice-versa encoder),

https://www.hexator.com/ (a Hex and vice-versa encoder),

https://www.cescaper.com/ (a C and C++ string escaper and unescaper),

https://www.csharpescaper.com/ (a C# string escaper and unescaper),

https://www.jsonescaper.com/ (a JSON string escaper and unescaper),

https://www.rustescaper.com/ (a Rust string escaper and unescaper),

https://www.pythonescaper.com/ (a Python string escaper and unescaper),

https://www.javascriptescaper.com/ (a JavaScript string escaper and unescaper),

https://www.javaescaper.com/ (a Java string escaper and unescaper) and

https://www.htmlinstant.com/ (a simple HTML editor).

All are written in .Net/C# and running on Azure, HtmlInstant has frontend in React, otherwise they are old ASP.NET MVC and Ajax :-)
gwern stands out by having both a curious mind and the dedication to actually research and document the struggle for answers.

I wish our interests could have continued down the same path because for me, distraction is the real mind killer.
I got the context. My point is that the whole “privacy” VPN industry is snake oil and people miss the point of VPNs when they buy into these services.
I just upgraded to 4 last week and discovered that the Goto Anything (Control/Command-P) feature is significantly faster when a project has millions of files (all of Chromium in my case). That was actually my main complaint with Sublime before so I'm pretty happy. I still prefer Sublime over any other editor.

My biggest feature request now is color support in the build output window. And maybe some quality of life stuff around adding/editing build systems and iterating on build output regexes which is clunky right now and could be much easier.

I'm not a huge fan of the code indexing stuff. It bogs down on large projects, and fuzzy search is never good enough for me. I want precise completions that can only come from LSP. Built in LSP support would be better. Actually, with good LSP support the build output window becomes less important because you can fix all your errors before building, so maybe do that instead of working on build systems.
Even in Yosemite, at the absolute peak of the tourist season, if you go to one of the trailheads outside the main valley, in the Chilnualna or Hetch Hetchy area, it isn’t overcrowded at all. If you take a multi-day backpacking trip, after the first half day hiking into the interior, you’ll hardly see any people at all. And the vast majority of Yosemite is further than an easy stroll from a parking lot. One tiny, tiny bit of Yosemite is crowded and the rest has very few people and still incredible natural beauty.
Roll20 has done OK with freeform text, I think. I'm not a UX expert but... what if the pulldown menu displayed the top 20 systems for the previous month, with an Other submenu that displayed everything else?
I fully expect grid energy storage to be where used BEV batteries spend the end of their usable life before getting recycled.

It'd just be nice if the manufacturers would establish some vendor-neutral standards already, paving the way for this future. I hate the idea of buying a BEV with a proprietary battery of such obvious long-term value beyond my vehicle's needs, especially when it forms such a huge portion of the vehicle's cost. At this point I'm half assuming I'll need to DIY a powerwall out back when the time comes to replace my future BEV's battery.
> Smart contracts are a hilariously bad idea

How exactly?
It may be a better unit, but I'd imagine most Venezuelan bitcoin users would have trouble obtaining XDR and/or transferring that ownership stake across borders. I would also worry that FX accounts could be subject to government seizure.
Iosevka with `quasiProportionalDiversity = 1`.

e.g. https://gist.github.com/4256994d206875f6407979d63b40764c
I'm really getting sick of this argument that bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency is using some ridiculous/insane amount of electricity while completely ignoring the costs of running the entire existing financial system. There are companies literally tunnelling through mountains to lay fiber so that they can make thousandths of a cent on stock trades and that's not worse? Come on.
> Real estate, there's no easy way to invest in it in a scalable way.

Of course there is. It's called a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust). If you want even more diversification, you can buy ETFs and mutual funds which hold multiple REITs in multiple market segments. You don't need to physically own a property to get real estate exposure...

> So, what are you going to do put ALL your money in Equities? with no diversification. People desperately need a store of value, they can't just work until their 120 year old.

You can buy bonds specifically indexed to inflation. In the United States, these are referred to as TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities). There are plenty of places to get exposure to these on the secondary market, eg: via ETFs.

I find it a bit silly to claim that you're interested in a store of value while holding a highly volatile asset like Bitcoin. By definition, a store of value should have low volatility and basically track inflation. Bitcoin has behaved far more like a speculative investment: yes, it's substantially trended upwards, but it's also been highly volatile. How do you reconcile accepting Bitcoin but rejecting equities, which have historically outpaced inflation by a significant margin?
Time immemorial: "extending beyond the reach of memory, record, or tradition, indefinitely ancient, ancient beyond memory or record."

Immoral: "an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong."
>If they can, intelligent design is falsified.

That's not true, demonstrating that process A could have resulted in the observed effect does not show that process B did not cause it.
yup. i didn't even know Hitachi is in IT. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi)

so many Global IT houses like IBM, Avanade...etc. is IT outsource/consulting pie so large to feed all these companies?
> Another question arises: what is it good for? It certainly isn't empancipating or empowering ordinary people

Here's a detailed thread[0] with global examples of empowerment of ordinary people. One example from the thread:

"
7/ Democracy movements and opposition leaders in Russia, Nigeria, Belarus, and elsewhere have used Bitcoin to receive donations and continue their human rights work while their traditional bank accounts have been frozen or suspended:

https://t.co/HSeP5g6TiV
"

[0] https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377040725414580224?s=1...
> an NFT actually becomes useful when it represents a right that is decoupled from one specific asset. More like a tradable auth role.

We do have something like that already, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS. It's basically DNS for Ethereum wallet addresses. Because wallets represent an owner, they're like an identity.

ENS names look like `acjohnson.eth`, and they're NFTs. That means they're also tradable on exchanges and marketplaces.

Unlike DNS, the entire ENS lookup and auction mechanism is on-chain. That means, there's no single point of failure, and given the contracts were written right (still hard to do), shuts down specific vector of attacks.
Perhaps it's naive of me, but I can't help but look down on this kind of behavior. I know that tax money is rarely spent in the most efficient way possible, but (ideally) the point of taxes is that they go to benefit the general public. Moving just so one doesn't have to pay as much, after (presumably) living in the state for some time feels selfish and greedy.
wait, but no. the goal of the runner is probably to get better at running not just winning whatever the cost.

someone who wanted to win no matter the cost even if it made them over the long run worse at running would probably find way to disqualify better runners or some other methods that doesn't necessarily involve enjoying running.

the difference between what you're describing and the the scenario is a difference between instrumental and intrinsic goals
> In ML (or more specifically deep learning), we make no distribution-based assumptions, other than the fundamental assumption that our training data is "distributed like" our test data.

Okay, so that's about the same as classical statistics. You're just waiving the requirement to know what the distribution is. You are still assuming there exists a distribution and that it holds in the future when you apply the model. Sure you may not be trying to estimate parameters of a distribution, but it is still there and all standard statistical caveats still apply.

> Indeed, with the use of autoencoders, we don't assume a single distribution, but rather a stochastic process.

Classical statistics frequently makes use of multiple distrutions and stochastic processes.
They don't smooth out, for me, at least. Airpods Max, for example, can just decide to transmit nothing but deafening static to the other side in the conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent#/media/File:Age...

It seems like the age of consent is political, or the age would be identical everywhere.

There is a bell curve for the start of human sexuality. Here in Sweden the age of 14 is the median for girls, 14.4 for boys, and the age of consent is set to 15. Does that mean 15 is a good age of consent? Should the age of consent be the median age, the 10% (12y), or the 80% (16y)?

Personally I prefer the "half the person's age + 7" rule (for the partner's minimum age), but I don't know any country that has that as an age of consent.
I feel like the title should be Taking on Google Analytics. Everyone associates Google with search, not so much website analytics. This title makes me think there’s someone trying to unseat their position in search.
> If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar...

0.01% is a fantasy, massively high conversion rate, just so you know.
- Fossil CO2 Emissions (2016) 35,753 megatons globally

- so gold mining is 0.2% of global CO2 emissions!?

- Bitcoin mining energy use is at least 78TWh annually

- 480-500g of carbon dioxide produced for every kWh consumed

- So mining bitcoin produces 40 megatons of CO2 per year, which is the same order of magnitude of gold mining.

- And mining bitcoin is 0.1% of global CO2 emissions

(I would be grateful if someone would check my calculation)

References:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/10/bitcoin-r...

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/
They are focused on completely different things though, this seems to be neighbourhood projects in Belgium and the Netherlands. Not focused on privacy and citizen data at all. But yeah they should have picked a different name.
[][x' > x]_x

TLA+ seems like an incredibly useful tool, but damn it could do with a better syntax. Math notation is designed to be written on paper and to handle extreme repetitiveness when you do proofs or calculations. Both of those premises are largely irrelevant in the domain TLA+ is intended for.
Ways to Solve [PII_email_148502ad759f50f39787] Error
>as much Everclear is "safe"!

A weekly argument in college.
Oh so I can basically do a SaaS and as long as I don't change the codebase without charing the changes its ok
It signals that they're not making a long-term committment to open source. When they pull the rug out from under you, the community will have to scramble to put together a viable fork. It is a highly disruptive event that we've seen happen many times. Some communities never recover.
One denies you money. The other denies you dignity and humanity. You're right that it's not even close, but I suspect you've got the analysis backwards.
After seeing this headline I installed rust and am reading the book.
I’m a musician and have a few music related hustles:

https://themusiciansnotebook.com I make the best music paper notebooks you can find!

https://audioremarks.com Site for sharing audio clips and leaving timestamped commentary, eg, a music teacher leaving feedback for a student
That's my point. I don't see how this would materially improve my experience. I've picked my trusted intermediaries and I shop through them.
How extensive a code portfolio would someone need for you to consider them? How much experience would they need?

I got my PhD about a year ago and have been retraining myself to become a data scientist when postdocs didn't happen, and I'm really not sure how to break into the market.
Most password managers protect against keylogging and screenshots.
I didn't manage to grasp it from quickly skimming the video and the gifs: is it possible to retry a command in piper until I find the right combination of flags, and only then press `|` to push it to the buffer? Ideally, keeping the incomplete command visible for editing all the time? Also, can I get back to older contents of the buffer, i.e. a couple `|`s back? If yes, that might be basically what I wanted up to be from the beginning.
I think the question posed is really odd, because race conditions cannot really exist as long as you only assume serial processing. I mean, the definition of a race condition means it's dependent on timing, which is an excluded risk if you're not attempting to start your services in parallel. So a better question in my opinion is: does the tradeoffs mean we should go back to serial execution? My feeling is no.
> something as instable as bitcoin?

Bitcoin isn't unstable. It has a fixed supply of 21M. It is the other currencies to which it is compared that are unstable. Bitcoin allows you to measure fiat currency instability.
The thread begins "RMS created non-safe spaces at both MIT & the FSF", which is a giveaway in itself.

"prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual" - the federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009, and millions of workers across the US have not gotten a raise for over a decade. For businesses making a profit - not a non-profit like the FSF. So staff getting COLAs once in a while sounds good in comparison.

I don't know if staff of the FSF non-profit were being paid fairly or not, but he does not seem to be living in the real world.

Someone else writing a diatribe against Stallman said he made MIT an "non-safe space" because he took naps in his office on a mattress as opposed to a couch.
I'm curious why you want a Data Scientist to show you a portfolio of code rather than a portfolio of data projects & outcomes. The code seems pretty secondary unless you're in a some specific field looking for code-based solutions to a niche problem.
> I genuinely don't understand what is the incentive for using Mozilla VPN?

Supporting browser development instead of Mozilla Foundation.

This way at least they pass through the hands of the organization that does the most important work.

(Nothing against the other issues but right now the browser should be their top priority and I was massively annoyed when I found that donations towards the foundation couldn't be used for browser development and the browser.)
It's way lower risk and if you can grow 50M into billions thats pretty much Unicorn level returns
I address the tenuous connection between NFTs and the underlying asset in the post. If after reading it, you have a different take, lemme know.