skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very true. I guess in my original comment I meant to imply this in talking about blue sky thinking and following through on it. For me this is work which is original, out of leftfield, probably intrinsically motivated and which you have the time to follow through on deeply for a sustained period of time.

I definitely agree on this being a factor in his, and likely several other, Nobel wins
There is a sweet spot somewhere between the extreme of not using pre-built tools and drowning in them.

I've been following a similar path: automation and testing give me certainty and peace of mind when I'm working on bigger teams, so they should also improve my personal projects, right?

Well, the difference is that my personal projects are used only by me in limited ways, and I also don't have to worry that someone will break the build when I'm not looking. So the extra work making things super safe would not pay off that much.

Except when I feel I'm losing grip on what I'm doing, either from having to cover many use cases, not being experienced, unstable dependencies, or risk of data loss. That's when I set up CI pipelines for my personal projects.
This started becoming bigger and bigger problem in Sofia (capital of Bulgaria, in the Balkan Peninsula, Eastern Europe). I live for 20 years here and now I want to get out because almost every plot of land eventually gets filled with the same faceless concrete and glass block that the office buildings are.

Aesthetic sentiments aside, those office buildings bring stress to the local infrastructure in many ways.

One win however is that local businesses that serve food and drinks at least survive which is not a small win during COVID-19 times.
For anyone curious - it's how you check whether the Monkey [1] UI stress-tester/fuzzer is running.

There's also isUserAGoat [2] which is more of an easter egg - initially (and now) it always returns false, but certain versions return true if Goat Simulator is installed [3].

[1] https://developer.android.com/studio/test/monkey

[2] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag...()

[3] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
Emojis --for people too fucking thick to express themselves in words!
Interesting how Feynman can be inspiring people long after his death.

He sounds as if he likes to talk about himself rather too much, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of exaggeration in his prose.

That said, if I made a list of dead people I'd like to spend a day with if I could, he'd sure be on it (as an aside, who [else] would you add to such a list?).

And he could be serious, too: despite being an outspoken atheist, he deeply loved his wife to the extent that he wrote a letter to her after she had passed away.
With regards to the "non-sensical" and "irrelevant":

Well, when procuring physical product, the source of its raw materials is relevant as well, you wouldn't want rain forests to be chopped down for your wood - so why aren't the raw materials of software relevant when considering if you want to use it?
Wise words. I'm sure most of us would never have learned all the of the basics of mathematics on our own. Though I do remember Feynman claiming in the book that he'd come up with certain trigonometric concepts on his own and then had to un-learn the names that he'd created for them and learn to call them sin, cos etc. That was pretty mind-blowing.

I suppose the question for me is: how do you find the right balance between formal learning and the self-directed learning, experimentation and practice?
Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able to just code for fun anymore.

I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up.

(I can't imagine how it is for people with kids. How do you get anything done in your private life at all?)
Shoot to wound is not an option in USA. Elsewhere it is literally trained and seen as option. And I am saying that cause I personally know non-American cop that has it as regular part of training.

There are also such options as shoot as warning, not shoot at all and generally use tactic that is less likely to create situation on which you have to shoot.
Nothing is ever perfect. Password managers are good thing and vastly more pragmatic than the folksy homemade "nuclear-launch-code" alternatives some HN'ers describe here.

Sticking with my password manager.
China is developing plans for a 13,000-satellite megaconstellation
Shannon also had a peculiar way of working, very scattered, I think he prioritized bursts of inspiration above everything.
FYI: The slideshow (S9) command line tool (packaged up as a ruby gem) is a classic (10+ years old) evergreen, see http://slideshow-s9.github.io/
For slide templates supported (incl. reveal.js) see http://slideshow-templates.github.io
Look for a new job and find something you truly love - I always loved the companies I worked with and It is difficult for me to lose that passion.

When you were yonger you were backed by somebody providing you food and a bed where to sleep ... you were more relaxed. Getting older means having more responsibilities and spending too much time on projects you simply love but dont’t bring money in is not feasible at all . Of course, it all depends from your lifestyle and how you want to live.

If you are lucky enough to be able to make money from any of your side projects - well... well done;)
I think I do understand. You see, Stallman would be downvoted to oblivion if he shared his thoughts here as well.

At the end of the day, IMO what really matters is being true to what you believe, regardless of what others do.

For instance, if you think it's dangerous to use Go because of its ties to Google, by all means don't use it and share it. I have the same thought regarding lots of Google services, although I disagree in this particular instance.

I personally would also hate to be in an environment where everyone thinks like me (i.e. an echo chamber). I grow as a person (and professional) when I'm confronted with views I don't agree with or I had never thought of. And in that sense HN has been a great learning experience so far.

As for your question, a less business-focused news aggregator I like to read is https://lobste.rs, lots of good stuff there.
It's tricky.

Bitcoin can process about 400k transactions per day at close to zero in energy consumption.

There are two forces to drive energy consumption higher:

1: Demand. If there is demand for more then 400k transactions per day, then bidding for inclusion drives the fees up which makes it viable for miners to invest more in Energy.

2: Security. A chain that is run on a single computer with low energy consumption could cheaply be recreated. So you would always think "Yes, I have been paid $X a month ago. But someone could invest $Y to make a longer chain without that transaction. That scares me.". Currently that $Y is about $1B per month. Which everyone assumes to be "Big enough". Not sure if $1M would also be big enough. If so, Bitcoins energy consumption could be reduced by a factor of 1000.

It is hard to predict to what type of equilibrium this will lead in the long run. We will only know in a couple of years when more halvings have happened and the mining reward is reducrd to the transaction fees.
The only good thing of this whole ordeal is that patches scrutiny and security awareness will improve for some time; but I despise the experiment and anyways believe that it will not lead to some organic improvement of the review process.
You haven't met a lot of electrical engineers.
This article doesn't mention which "utilities" backed out. Probably because the readers would then laugh at the subsequent ridiculousness of the article's premise:

Here are a few: The city of Beaver, Utah. The city of Bountiful, Utah. The cities of Lehi, Logan, and Kaysville Utah.
Just why is this on HN?
My dad was in manufacturing. He always told the car companies to fuck off because of this. If you start doing business with a car company, the bullying starts right away. You eventually are forced to choose between them and your other customers. It’s probably best to just never start down that road if you can avoid it.
> The Vale of Glamorgan council

That sounds like something straight out of Tolkein!
I don’t want to repeat the old and tired JavaScript hate, but this just isn’t a great idea.

I’d suggest that there are 3 important primitives for data science: flexible numeric types, fast math/algorithm libraries, and data manipulation being easy.

JavaScript doesn’t really have any of these. Numbers are 64bit floats only - no integers, no big numbers. There aren’t equivalents to Numpy/Pandas/Scikit Learn, and the lack of standard library and expressiveness in data manipulation in the language makes basic tasks harder.

JavaScript has its uses, but there’s really no reason to force data science be one of them.
I wonder how much is made by very simple emotions:

- playing
- competition
- noble obligations (helping someone else)

I keep looking at adult life in dismay because what people consider work would barely amount to 20 minutes of soccer when we were kids. We used to run wild for hours, hurt ourselves, attempt everything that could work and we kept asking for more. Can we plug that back into daily adult jobs ?
Hm, it’s different for me. Since at work I don’t really do the Continuous Integration/Delivery stuff (or anything with “real infrastructure”), I find it very enjoyable to fiddle with it at home. There’s no pressure to accomplish anything and I can just leave it alone for months or even years before coming back to it.

There’s a nice side-effect, too: The CI definition documents how to compile the project. I recently dug out an old LaTeX “project” and there was nothing, no Makefile or anything. Had to look up everything again to get it to run (with XeLaTeX and Biber).
Towards Understanding ChAdOx1 NCov-19 Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombocytopenia
tldr: The author's just annoyed at having to agree to a TOS and enable javascript.
I see, thanks for explaining all that!
Very interesting breakdown. It sounds to me like the core of the problem is that everyone needs fab slots to build their things, but fab slots are a limited resource and car manufacturers have bid up their price to levels few others are willing to match. Does that seem about right?
Simple steps to wake up early and energized
Annual fees on those farms make no sense...

We've got a quote for €6k - €2.5k subsidy for 8KW system. We use a ton of power - which is a main factor how quickly you get your money back.
It kind of reminds me of what ReasonML/ReScript look like. They bolt a new frontend (syntax) on the OCaml compiler, giving it a C/C++/Java/JS like feel (curly braces, parens around function args).
I see, thanks. I presume the end-user running the application will need to have up-to-date drivers to take advantage of these changes in the past 4 years?
Curiously the websocket spec says the server may send 30x code during handshake, but the client is "not required to follow it".

So in this case you're relying on a specific client's decision more than you're relying on universal interface.
This is pretty common in the ML line of languages. Here’s F# doing the same thing: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe...
Space Spinoffs: The Technology to Reach the Moon Was Put to Use Back on Earth
I don't understand why Bitcoin has been designed to burn fossil fuels when it should just as easily be able to be run using green energy.

Until this is changed I can't see cryptocurrencies having a future, despite their utility.
Look better. Dont be fooled by syntax. Learn about sum types, pattern matching, strong typing guarantees. Then look again.
Grandparent wrote 165GW not GWh. 165GW is 1445TWh per year.
Would be possible to have a better Street Fighters 2 on the Amiga?
Space Junk Could Destroy the Future of Space Travel
out of context it's not data science
Very interesting talk, thanks for sharing, it really adds some weight to the intuitive idea showcased in Feynman's note.
Cisco are also getting stung at the latest node. For their new line of Silicon One switch/router chips they decided to ditch their usual fabless partner (Broadcom?) and go direct to the fab (I think it's Samsung but not sure - doesn't really matter anyway). They did this to save money and also with the intention of producing their own merchant silicon to directly compete with Broadcom's. This would have been a great plan if there hadn't been a major 7nm capacity problem which resulted in the smaller players, such as themselves, not getting the wafers they need. I don't think there are any public reports of anyone using Silicon One yet (except Cisco themselves) but this won't help them win any orders.

The car industry might have something to do with it also but it's by no means the only cause of Cisco's concerns.
This feels, frankly, childish. The privacy policy that has him so incensed is just an explanation, in clear English, of how information is stored and processed. All they are saying is "if you send us information, please make sure you're happy with what we'll do with it".
> I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way].

To me it's even more inspirational that Feynman misremembered basic things about physics he understood better than almost anyone. He achieved so much, and yet fundamentally was human and imperfect. Any curious smart mind can achieve something great.
Moscow is larger than Paris or London. Madrid is 5-6 million. Saint Petersburg, Barcelona and Berlin are over five million. None of those are small by Asian standards. (to claim Paris is a large city by Asian standards, you must be going by the metropolitan area population)

The Los Angeles metro area is also one of the largest in the world. It is very obviously a city by the same standards that define sprawling Asian cities, and it's larger than Chicago.
In the Netherlands at least there are several suppliers that will lease your roof to put solar panels on it and then either give you a monthly fee or you use them as supplier and you get discount on the bill.
Drats. Apologies. Too late for me to fix :(
Moral lessons from free software and GNU Emacs
> Nowadays there are chips which simply don't get documentation in English because chipmakers simply don't have a single client needing it

Oh, yeah, even the CKS32 chip on my Blue Pill only has a Chinese datasheet. It's common. (Worse is when you can get the Chinese datasheet at all only if you know the right people, who invariably live in Shenzhen. Or Wuxi, or maaybe Taipei.) It's not a totally new problem. My aunt had to learn German for her chemistry degree back in the 01960s, and here in Argentina pretty much everybody who learns to program has to learn English. Gauss wrote his dissertation in Latin; Euler wrote most of his papers in Latin. As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.

But where was RISC-V designed? At Berkeley. By professors and grad students from China, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the US, Greece, and Germany, I think. (Asanović is naturalized American.)

I agree that there's a lot of unpublished knowledge (PV is part of the semi industry), and a lot of that knowledge is being created in places like Wuxi. But I don't think it's true that the tip of the iceberg we can see is so inconsequential. That tip is what prevents things like the circa-2000 capacitor plague, and many new developments originate in basic research long before they make it to mass production, PERC being perhaps the latest.

Also, you can bet that the rulers of Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt are not enthusiastic about their countries' access to their own abundant solar energy being dependent on their foreign relations with China, or on China's internal industrial policy; nor do they want their solar power stations to ship with Chinese remote kill switches—not currently a thing, but certainly feasible if China's bargaining position improves sufficiently.

We've seen how that kind of thing plays out many times: the US backdoor in Crypto AG hardware, the US blockade of oil to Japan in WWII, the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, the constant struggles with US export controls in every country that isn't the US (Tianhe-2 being a recent salient example), China's rare-earth exportation clampdown 10 years ago, the US oil blockade that led Germany to spin up Fischer–Tropsch coal liquefaction, the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh, and so on. So quite reasonably they're investing in the possibility of developing autonomous national solar industries, a 21st-century Saudi Aramco and YPF, just without the oil.

Will they be successful? Maybe. Or maybe they'd have to do what China did for process engineering: get Chinese PV companies to open factories in Egypt and Jordan in order to transfer the necessary knowhow.
They use data-forge.js, which has less stars than danfo.js.

I can't find any benchmark how they compare to data.table or pandas.

Without a dominant and high performance data frame library as a foundation, I wouldn't even try.
There is decimal.js but yes it's not going to be fast.
Fair enough :)

Thank you! I will have a look at the site!

(And yes, I agree echo chambers are bad, I merely grant myself an exception in trying to filter corporate viewpoints out because they're basically everywhere in daily life so I really don't think I need to see any more of them to know their point of view.)
> Do any security researchers ask permission before finding other vulnerabilities in random open source code? I have never observed this.

That's not what happened. Nobody is asking (or is expected to ask) when they look for vulnerabilities. The researchers were trying to introduce vulnerabilities. Had they only looked at the tools that maintainers use and given those a good shake to see whether an attack vector is lurking there, everybody would have been happy.

> IMO we should double down and raise grants to offer as bug bounties for people that successfully get potentially malicious code past code review in majorly depended on open source projects.

The likely consequence of that would be maintainers shutting down public contributions because nobody has time to deal with automated submissions from scripts that are bounty hunting.
Computer security world in mourning over death of Dan Kaminsky
I don't see JS as less powerful than Python for data science, it's faster than Python, or can use bindings just like Python. JS is maybe less commonly used than Python in data science nowadays, but I wouldn't be surprised if this changes in next years. There are equivalent libs like tensorflow-core, there are native features like BigInt, and there are libs for 64bits floats (decimal.js, big.js). I'd be glad to spend some time converting Scikit-learn into JS and also show you how expressive JS actually is, if you show me some Python code, I'll translate it
I think it's fair to say the compiler does a lot of heavy lifting in Rust
Ask HN: Is SQLite suitable for command sourcing application?
I used to work with LevelDB (with typescript). It's very easy and fast to develop with.

Recently I'm playing with sqlite, aim to save some disk space by normalizing the data.

I spend quite some time to define the tables and write insert queries in normalized format. I even try to "compact the data" by using a table to store all unique string then reference to it's primary key.

I suppose storing the data in the rigid and compact format should result in smaller file size but it seems I am wrong.

The data I'm storing are immutable request log (timestamp, type, and input) for command-sourcing style of server.
The current state of server are not persisted.
Each time the server is restarted, it just replay all the request logs to restore the state.

The architecture is inspired from cqrs and event sourcing, except the write model is simply the storage, the read model is in a single process's memory, and it's sourcing from the commands, not events. (Though some kind of attempt-commands spawn verified-commands and are skipped when replay to avoid applying side-effect twice)

File size for reference: JSON Files 409M, SQLite 114M, LevelDB 63M.

The SQLite file is smaller than LevelDB after zip, but access sqlite over zip file doesn't sound a good solution.
It also really depends on what you find cool, there are different ways to look at things. For example if I think of pipelines as these execution graphs that run on their own and make sure your artifacts end up in the right place, then its really fun. CI systems that visualize this make it even more interesting.

A little combination of the right personal interests and perspective goes a long way towards building up resilience to deal with the ugly bits.
Regarding lack of mental flexibility - it’s like when you move a turtle to a new patch of grass. Sometimes they get confused by the teleportation and will stop eating until they’ve made their way to their home range, which is sometimes never.
Just chunk it out. Review and reflect. And then iterate. Doesn't have to be perfect the first time.
Life is a fractal phenomenon on different scales, from the molecular to the social. It is transitions between stable equilibria that rely on positive and negative feedback loops. I think a future mechanistic theory of behavior will find that motivation provides the process for exploration/exploitation but doesn't form the basis of goals or ethics. Instead those are stable equilibria at the human population level that are more or less discovered in a Darwinian way.
A longer discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925044 but the Regsiter's obituary is worth a read in its own right.
I live in Suburban Chicago. AWD and ground clearance are not “status symbols” here: there’s a thing called snow 1/3 of the year.

Our last big snow storm of the season required me to pick up my in-laws and take them to the doctor. Their BMW 5-whatever sedan couldn’t even make it out of their parking garage.
That is a long time to wait for break even. I paid €3700 for 4500Wp and I expect to earn them back in 3-4years.

I’m facing almost directly south without any shade from trees.
Not everybody is Feynman ofcourse. You have to accept the risk that giving freedom for creativity won't end up with anything useful.
Any idea why Bitwarden insist on their installation ID generation for self hosted deployments? it strikes me as unusual, as it's not documented WHY it's necessary, or what the ID is used for, only that you're required to give Bitwarden your email address to get the necessary ID.

If they would remove this step, or at the very least explain it, I'd be more likely to deploy and use it. Critical things like password managers should be self hosted where possible, IMO, and this is a blocker preventing trivial deployments.
Roto-toms were cool for a while.
Awesome, one of the pain points I have with Deckset is not having an iOS version. The other one is exporting to an HTML compatible mode (to keep animated GIFs… animated). I wrote my own tool (https://github.com/rberenguel/haskset) to leverage Pandoc and make a reveal.js export look like Deckset, but that's not ideal (basically, I don't have feature parity and any time I use a new feature I have to implement it…).