skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lecture in the sequences and series portion of calculus where the prof took the Taylor series of e^x and then substituted x=i*theta into the resulting polynomial and all of the terms magically divided themselves into the Taylor series’s for sin and cos was a jaw dropping moment for me.

I was in my second year of EE, and it completely changed my relationship with a ton of practical material for me, eg the Fourier transform.

On the other hand, I also took vector calculus that year but it wasn’t until the following year when I took the E&M course (electric and magnetic fields) where I truly appreciated surface integrals, path integrals, etc. One of the biggest Aha! moments there was really appreciating how properly structuring the problem could dramatically simplify the computations. Eg if you can make it symmetric you can often cause integrals to disappear implicitly without having to compute them at all, or you can take a dramatically simpler path through a vector field and end up at the same place without a ton of complex computation. Absolutely beautiful :D
To this very day I wonder why people torture themselves with Windows Explorer instead of just using Total Commander and pressing Alt+F9.
Being opinionated is okay if your product is interoperable with others. Then people have the choice between your product and its potential replacements so having choices within your product is not as important. I guess Go is okay because we can afford multiple library ecosystems and programs written in different languages can interoperate.

Unfortunately for-profit companies really don't like giving their customers the choice to switch to a competitor.
So far in in most of the world even platter disks (which have really poor performance with modern Windows) are faster than network. Which means you can download description of the difference and reorder the file locally much faster than downloading it. Yes it needs the file to made in a way that is update friendly - most current compression algorithms can be configured like that. Yes, compression will be slightly lower, but you will save on both download size AND disk space, because right now most patches require you to download patch and then apply it, requiring twice the space. If you have 5% larger asset file but can patch it with a few memcpy on a mapped file it is a win in every way imaginable.

It is just really poor programming, nothing more. And it's everywhere. If find source >/dev/null takes 6 seconds there is no reason for gradle to take 2 minutes on a rebuild. If the dev is used to that, why would they even think about patch optimisation?
Here's the source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...

Emissions are closely tied to consumption.
Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s

Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
I don’t think this is true. Python tests take a loooong time to run while (on the other extreme) Go tests can compile and run nearly instantly, at least based on my 10-15 years experience with both languages.
What does blockchain do for you to solve the fundamental financial problems you're tackling?
Microsoft edge Ads blocker block Google ads but not Microsoft
Pay-walled news should be banned on HN unless it really is the only source. There are a bunch of outlets not hiding this story behind one and linking to a paywall is just terrible for engagement.

Here is the UK announcement https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-investigates-facebook...
Anecdotal and a complete digression from your point - I consider myself a poweruser of excel/word/etc and I loathe the online variants in O365. There's quite a few features missing in both that require me to use the offline variant that are both supported in GSuite. Table of Contents generator in Word is probably the biggest one I hate that is missing, and the clipboard nonsense isn't great either, but last time I used it in gsuite it wasn't a problem.
Depends what you mean as 'good'. They're quite serious about killing everything else: sheer Darwinist obliteration of all competition. It doesn't worry them one bit if their endgame is 'world of fired people and a few superheroes suffering terribly to work at demonic intensity until they break'. That stuff is not their problem.

I didn't even blink at seeing this article. It tracks with the whole Amazon concept, very closely.

Is there a MORAL reason for doing this? Only if you think there's some special merit in celebrating that state of human existence beyond all other ways to be, and outside of any larger systems thinking. It would work nicely in Dalek World, where it's moral to exterminate all failed humans.

In 'evolutionary world' where we draw a lot of innovation and originality from integrating unexpected viewpoints and novel ideas, the Amazon thing is a quick road to starving your gene pool of anything useful. They're actively making other, less efficient forms of human employment unsustainable, rather than just unprofitable.
Soemone made a bot to try luck winning on twitter: https://qz.com/476914/i-built-a-twitter-bot-that-entered-and...

Won over 1000 contests from 165 000 tries.

Btw. I think this is very sad - legit 1000 people could not have fun winning some stuff that actually interets them (e.g. some niche fanbase).
Add in the fact that the reason they are related appears to involve infinity (power series). It is tough to argue against it being an impressive result.
I assume you'd have no issue taking down a database full of child pornography? You know there are some who argue that CP is just "bits on disk".

What if society determines that cryptocurrency also has negative externalities? You're free to disagree but I just stuck my finger in the air and it's pretty clear which way the wind is blowing.
Who really knows the details? It's very difficult to get reliable information from the CCP and they have already been caught trying to cover things up. My guess is no one really knows outside of China and the people claiming to know either way are lying
I think this quote may be key
"because they live in deep desert burrows, mole rats have few natural predators."

Having few natural predators seems to a commonality with exceptionally long-lives species.

This made me wonder, do naked mole-rats have lower genetic diversity than other mammals? Turns out they do https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Seems to me it's likely that the more natural predators a species has, the more evolutionary pressure it has to increase genetic diversity. One of the ways to increase genetic diversity is to turn up the rate of aging, so you don't get some long lived individuals that keeps having children for ages.

On the flip-side, with few natural predators, genetic diversity isn't as important and the rate of aging can be turned down.
Swift: When to use weak self and why
Are we being fools? Do you only get ahead in the world if instead of spending our precious time building things we use it cannabalizing other peoples work?
I'm not. Our industry is filled with people who have bought hook, line and sinker into the "I'm passionate about what I do and that's all I need" cult, especially in the Bay Area/startup world. They assume they're well compensated (a few are--maybe a higher fraction than in other industries, even--but most of them aren't) and don't pay attention to that sort of thing much.
A Detailed Paleo Diet Food List of What to Eat and Avoid
Unless you’ve been lifestyle under a shake, you’ve heard concerning the paleo diet. The diet regimen might lead to weight reduction in the short term, as effectively as lower blood pressure, controlled blood sugar, and also different feasible benefits.
Semantic Palette: Guiding Scene Generation with Class Proportions
Do you have any examples of what is superior in O365? As my other reply states I've found it to be the opposite - GSuite supports _more_ than MS does online.
With my impeccable timing, I took my first looks at ZFS right at the very twilight of OpenSolaris, literally weeks before Oracle took over. I ended up running one of its successors (OpenIndiana) for a while, but it wasn't too friendly with white-box hardware; AHCI hot swap was risky, and KVM only worked on Intel CPUs. Getting VirtualBox VMs to start on boot was fun (not). It was still worth the aggravation just to have ZFS, though; it's saved my bacon more than once, and made life a lot easier when I need to migrate data or VM images.

I was glad indeed when Ubuntu started shipping an OpenZFS module. ZFS with virt-manager makes for an excellent VM host.
I work out a lot. And sometimes I work hard at my software job.

But the #1 lesson from both had not been to work nonstop and burn yourself out, rather it’s to take regular breaks, slack off, and go easy on yourself. If you’re in a punishing situation, you won’t want to get back on the horse for the next big push.

Trainers recognize too that rest and recovery are important. I ran 6 miles Sunday, 2-3 throughout l, and am not running today.
Truly, compassion.
I think the work of the people operating a system is just as important as the one of the programmer. You can build the very solid plane or software and then have it fail due to being operated in the wrong fashion.

The question is whether both sides are doing their best, within reason, to mitigate issues. The programmer doing everything right while the admins forget to patch for years won't change a thing. The opposite is true, patching or configuring correctly won't do a thing if the system is full of "built-in" holes.

It's not a stretch to think of a setup where specific conditions that define this "within reason" are established for software developers and administrators. It's what an audit should normally uncover: weaknesses in the process, points for improvement, etc. Only this time it would be in the form of general and specific guidelines that get progressively stronger as time passes. It's not a sure thing but it raises the bar enough for most ransomware attacks to become cost prohibitive for the attacker.
I'm talking about their moral/ethical compas.
My side projects are mainly Open Source JavaScript libraries

* LIPS: https://lips.js.org/ Powerful Scheme-based Lisp interpreter in JavaScript

* jQuery Terminal: https://terminal.jcubic.pl/ for building CLI applications in Browser

* Sysend.js: https://github.com/jcubic/sysend.js for sending messages to other tabs/windows in same browser

* Favloader: https://github.com/jcubic/favloader Favicon animation library
Questions to Ask Before Adopting Usage Based Pricing
I'm not waiting for an eventual tiny improvement in Gflops/watt... the SuperMicro boards are really industrial and the Atom line is being cancelled for a low wattage version of the consumer chips!

I think these boards are the first and last to be able to run 100 years! Earlier models consume too much energy and subsequent will be too fragile/complex!
https://qz.com/476914/i-built-a-twitter-bot-that-entered-and...

Twitter bot to retweet and follow evetything that mentioned a contest... won a thousand contests.
> "We don't know exactly why or how it works, we just know that it does work," says Michael Kinch, an associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written a book on vaccination. Kinch and others suspect this form of inoculation may have worked because it introduced the smallpox virus through the skin, rather than the lungs.

This is really interesting, I wonder if we have any evidence of similar behavior of other viruses?
It always bothered me that mole rats were a common enemy in those games. Mole rats are native to East Africa, not the Eastern US.
your view is that it is a giant and incredible cover up by the Chinese government

Really? My starting point is that the Chinese government would likely cover up being blamed for a deadly pandemic that has killed millions.

They haven't even admitted their COVID death statistics since early on last year: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda759474...

They stopped counting COVID deaths after the first 100k or so... in February.
You don't seem to understand China.

Hollywood actor Cena just begged in Mandarin for forgiveness after mentioning Taiwan is a country (which it is). Local Amsterdam politicians are not allowed to go on the photo with Taiwanese politicians etc.

The Communist Party is overly controlling and will not allow anything that will challenge their vision.

While Europe and the US were busy with their internal quarrels the last decades, China has been making moves.
>no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless

On the contrary, companies do this frequently. Sometimes it's simply because the job is not "clearly useless" in the eyes of the management, even if it's obvious to other people.

More often, the usefulness of the job to the organization itself, or to people inside it, has become disconnected from its actual usefulness. For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.
Its interesting to see the discrete case.

Let D_n be a difference operator like
D_n(F) = F(x+n) - F(x)

Solving by induction for the equation D_n(F)/D_n(x) = F(x), F(0)=1, it gives (1+n)^(x/n).

So now you have a "family" of functions that when "derived" by its difference, gives the same constant ^ x. Euler is the case when n→0.

This aplies for every n, including complex numbers.
Among other things this idea ignores (and which other commenters mentioned), there's also time factor. The one thing that's often forgotten wrt. the market.

The market is a dynamic system, constantly trying to reach some kind of equilibrium (defining which is left as an exercise to the reader). As such, it evolves through time, and has some degree of inertia. It's perfectly possible - and in fact, common - for such dynamical systems to oscillate and orbit the desired state without ever reaching it.

If you took a market as it is today, and have everyone just do whatever it is they're doing, then it's likely it would've reached some stable state. But in reality, market participants constantly change what they're doing, responding to and trying to predict what everyone else is doing.

(Especially that last part is one that's damning to any kind of predicting.)

In such conditions, bullshit jobs can persist, because they appear faster than the market is optimizing them away.
What can they really do? Nobody has an operating system fit for task in the age of mobile code and persistent internet. Sure, Fuchsia and Genode are coming along, but they aren't ready yet. Anything else is duct tape and bailing wire.
For any companies in retail, using AWS can be a hard sell because of Amazon being a competitor. GCP/Azure are much easier for them.

As for Google banning accounts, that is not a thing past a certain level. They would be in breach of contract – past a certain point the business has a contract, it's not a personal GSuite account paying by credit card, it's a business account with a more substantial contract, SLAs, etc.

Turning off a whole service for a company violating terms of service (like what happened with AWS+Parler) is another case.
Check the laws first. Some places only require one party (you the recorder) to consent.
> as you can just bill them more

I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project.

It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.
There's nothing wrong with having good defaults, just with not being able to override them. "Opinionated" usually means latter.
I wished there was a list that maps these classes to it's equivalent on Coursera / edx (if they exist).

I've noticed that interesting classes like SICP cs61a from Berkeley still take place online (their material is available), but are no longer available on the MOOC platforms. The same goes with some interesting MIT classes (Introduction to Computational Thinking)

(Although a certificate from such platform doesn't mean that much to me, it does help somewhat with motivation and looks better on a beginners resume than nothing. )
That’s interesting and sounds positive you had autonomy.

Did they have an expected return on investment and just use your existing planned earnings growth? If they didn’t change your earnings slope, did they have a timeframe in mind for the multiple they used to buy you?

For example, if you earned $1 in the year of purchase and $.50 the year before and projected $2,3,4,5 in the next four years; did they use this for your purchase price? Or did they project some efficiency that shifted your projections to $3,4,5,6 and used that for the purchase valuation?

Only if you’re able to discuss, obviously.
Really a great article! It's extremely rare to find people who truly understand Clojure/Lisp willing to share to this detail.

Having said that, the article also exposes some flaws of Clojure that I also found.

1. Clojure overly obsesses with expression and non-procedural style coding. While in reality many large scale Clojure repo deploy their own macro to bring procedural style back (like letlocal in the article).

2. The builtin abstraction tools are almost always too simple to be useful.

But those are not big deals IMO.

At the same time, I also wonder if this article mention any feature of Clojure that is truly unique to Clojure compared to other Lisp/Scheme languages. I wonder if the article will still make sense if we simply substitute all "Clojure" to "Racket" (obviously I know ecosystem is not comparable).
Like it or not, the term "defense" to mean something military-related is all over the Department of Defense, the defense budget, and defense contracting. While you are welcome to write off all these sources as ideologically contaminated, I think there must surely be better reasons to do so than their use of the term "defense". And, of course, you'll deprive yourself of news about specific technological developments.
Huge amounts of the economy are not competitive markets, even ignoring state enterprises.

For instance: large companies and monopolies can stand to sustain a lot of "bullshit" as anticompetitive pressures and just economics of scale and generally just social inertia (e.g. "well competitor X might be cheaper but do they represent higher risk?") let them get away with inefficient practices. They have to do a lot of bullshit before this becomes a risk to them.

Most companies have some elasticity on this also when what they can spend is not directly tied to their revenue and their competitive position in the market. I.e. they can raise more money than their competitive position might suggest through either loans or investment. Loans and investments cannot be perfectly efficient because there is always incomplete information when awarding finance. This may occur in some types of startups but it's true for many established companies as well.

It's not necessarily the case either that bullshit jobs have to be stable in order to represent a large chunk of the labour market either. They may be wiped out by competitive pressures in one area only to open up in another.

Charities/non-profits may also provide another place for bullshit jobs to hide. Not all charities are perfectly efficient and they do not operate competitively.

In almost every corner of the economy there are inefficiencies where bullshit jobs can hide.
Katherine Eban is exactly the right person to be reporting on this. Her work on fraud in the generic drug industry has been eye-opening.
This is an really interesting thought and could really be a gamechanger...
>>"Industrial Athletes"
eh?

OK, where are the coaches & trainers, the practice & drills, the skill-building, all focused on exceptionally intense competition events that often result in a flow state?

Where are the rest & travel days after the competition?

Where are the cheering crowds & high salaries for the best? Or at least the acclaim for those who show top performance in the more obscure sports?

I've seen Industrial Athletes - a great example is the engine-building competitions at some auto racing trade events. Those guys go from a table of parts to a running 500+hp engine in 20 minutes - its amazing to see!

But they don't do that every day.

And, having competed at international levels and worked in physically demanding jobs, I've thought about the possibility of assembling high-performance worker teams. The problem is that it isn't economically sustainable. There are very few real-world situations where fewer people working faster really is required, and the extra pay and rest days required for even 80% athletic level performance makes it almost always better to just hire more and work them at a sustainable pace.

And sure, using a few tips from athletes such as staying hydrated is good, but trying to trick them into seeing themselves as "industrial athletes", without providing the support (like even bathroom breaks) is disgusting.
evidently bringing heavy computerization to processes that have existed a long time does nothing to make those processes more powerful.
Perhaps they will have "Corporate Olympics" to determine performance reviews.
It absolutely does not follow. Two kidneys are better than one, surgeries are not risk free, and to imply that a person has an obligation to give their organ to someone if they care about them is asinine.
This probably won't have the effect you're hoping for. It'll probably just mean that progressive politicians will get away with saying the most racist shit you can imagine and conservative politicians being banned for saying abortion is murder. Facebook has been a little better than most other platforms when it comes to how they apply their moderation though so I'm willing to give them a chance.
> The problem is that our systems are architected so that even one exploitable bug anywhere in hundreds of millions of lines of code enables total and irreversible subversion of the system

A modern jet airliner uses about 1,500,000 bolts and screws. Imagine if they were designed so that a failure of any one of them could cause a catastrophic failure of the entire aircraft. Then imagine if people were defending it by saying “This is a metallurgy problem. There will always be the occasional improperly cast bolt or over tightened screw. To expect that to never happen is victim blaming”.
> There were some stressful days, like when I wasn’t sure if I could get printing to work on Linux at all

I never empathized with a line in a blog more.
The compactness of APL is indeed quite intriguing. One could also write your example in Julia by:

sum(j -> j*2.0^(-j),1:n)

sum(function,array) applies function to all elements of array before the summation (without need to allocate an intermediate array).
Five Reasons To Be Excited About Decentralized Storage
See this video by two minute papers [1] for more information:

[1]https://youtu.be/KEdrBMZx53w