skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for this recommendation. I agree with you about quality over quantity. Working through a ~600-page (sometimes more) technical book is no easy task, and in fact can be pretty demotivating especially if you're learning on your own.

I feel like some people are compelled to gather these monster lists due to their hoarding inclinations---and it probably serves as "useful" procrastination as well. As I get older and curate my bookshelf further, I find myself either discarding a lot of overlapped material or skipping through the majority of the content. Otherwise there is no escape, as the SE field is so dynamic and complex, that the list of "required readings" trully is overwhelmingly large.
On the origin of the lambda symbol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Origin_of_the_...
I guess it depends on what you all vouchers, most people advocate backpack funding. The same amount of money per student is spent, but the parents get to choose the school their kid goes to. Instead of being forced to send their kid to failing schools, new schools can be created to cater to the desires of the parents/children.

So it doesn't defund public schools, but it does break the public school monopoly and allows competition among schools - they can cater to the needs of the community and experiment.
Take a picture of the whiteboard at the end of a constructive discussion and email that to everyone.

The absolute worst thing is someone with a laptop struggling to type everything down, or everything they feel like transcribing, and not participating in anything.
It might be extreme, but I think employee should have to earn the right to work from home. It should not be assumed nor automatically granted, unless it’s for a documented severe physical limitation. Reading over this letter, and others like it at similar companies just sounds like a lot of spoiled over paid people and think they are special. There’s a great sense of entitlement wafting up from the page.
checks calendar

nope, it’s not April 1
I still haven't found a way to beat markdown in a private git repo.

It's certainly more friction than using apple notes, which I used to use, but in an extreme long term view, markdown plaintext files will still be accessible if Apple ever goes out of business, whereas anything stored in my iCloud is kaput.

If Apple Notes would let you write markdown and easily export/sync notes, I think I would use it again just for ease of use (especially when AFK). But on my computer I've always got vscode open anyway, so why not just have a window open to my notes repo.
Oh, yes, Autoconf was somewhat defensible when it was created.

Just like PHP and COBOL solved real problems back in their heyday.

They are just not something anyone should be using nowadays.

(Btw, Facebook's Hack is a surprisingly pleasant language. Probably the best one they could have made, coming from PHP.)
>Probably the most interesting to me; they tend to have rather isolated jobs. I suppose they haven't been exposed to incompetence at scale.

What do you mean by this?

You have me wondering because in my experience 'conspiracy' is the norm - every business decision I've seen has been the product of a private discussion between a handful of decision makers. The alternative is harder to believe - that decisions are made unilaterally or off the cuff in front of the public.
> mRNA can only be used to make the body make proteins that, well, the body can make. This might seem obvious, but it’s a pretty key part of where Moderna’s “software of life” analogy falls flat. It’s a limited software with limited toolkits. You’re not going to use mRNA in humans to make, say, an antibiotic that’s naturally produced in fungi.

Hmm? I keep hearing about plants and bacteria that have been genetically modified to secrete e.g. animal proteins. Do fungi assemble their proteins from a different set of amino acids than animals do?
You know you can lock modules versions, right?
And of course the environment recreation needs to be tested periodically if you have a disaster recovery plan.
Luddite: a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.

Seems like you came up with the perfect word to describe your view on this. :P

I defintiely do think there is reason to worry about the future you're imagining happening, but as someone who has read through the papers on gpt, this is in no way going to end up being an exclusive proprietary API, so it'll very soon have open source and likely free or at compute cost options.

And well, if it doesn't make us better, no one will use it. If it does, you'll have to adjust to remain competitive, just like millions of professionals for going back millenia who encounter new technology in their chose and vocation. Ultimately, if it makes us better, and doesn't enslave us to the whims of a monopolistic holder (which the point of my post was to conjecture that it likely wouldn't) then it'll probably (though not defintiely) be better for us long term.

Hopefully it doesn't erode programmers abilities like spell check seems to have eroded people's spelling abilities but I fear that's a likely side effect.
Maybe a better way would be to stop selling them food. We still want to buy Apple products, but they need to buy food.
There ought to be a rule that any "curated" list of N books should also include N books not to read in the same category
Well, I kind of agree but you also need a home base language, one that you wrote a lot of code in to drill those ideas into your head. Without writing a lot of code and coming across various types of computing problems, you won't be able to go past syntax in other new languages.

If I know how closures work, then I can pick them up in Lua or Go or JS very easily, all I need is to figure out the syntax, I already know the computational pattern. On the other hand to get to know how closures work I need to write a lot of them and use them in many scenarios.

You kinda need that 'one' language to get the point where you can learn multiple languages well. My cs courses kinda sucked, but one good thing they did was to teach me C, C++ and Java pretty extensively.
Someone else alluded to this, but Erlang as a runtime prioritizes -latency-. Most languages prioritize -throughput-. These are fundamentally at odds with each other (oversimplifed, but - to maximize throughput you want things queuing up; to maximize latency you don't). This also isn't to say different versions of libraries and things don't muddy it some too, but look at the latency tail.

From those techempower benchmarks, look at elixir-plug-ecto. 2.8 ms max latency, with an average of 1.0ms latency. That average latency is very respectable (but not the lowest), but that max? That max IS the lowest.

What do you want from a web server? Something super fast for 99% of requests, and then takes orders of magnitude longer for the worst case, or something that is somewhat slower on average, but stays predictable?

And as someone still else alluded to, those have to do with the runtime characteristics. How easy is it to write reasonably performant, correct, concurrent code? Erlang (and Elixir) makes it very easy; I would argue easier than any other language.
Miss Nevada USA title won by transgender woman for first time
The cure will always be 5 years away (until someone figures out how to convince pharma that they don’t actually need that $45B/year that comes from selling treatments).
For what it's worth, I realized after I wrote that original comment that I have a (rather powerful) desktop in my basement that I stopped using several months ago (really, about 2-3 years ago my usage dropped off substantially). I had just done a large hardware upgrade, re-activated Windows 7 Ultimate and ... a project heated up which caused me to not use it for almost six months, the PSU started to flake out, causing it to be unstable under moderate load (with PSU testing A-OK) resulting in another 6-months of reluctant, infrequent, use which became so infrequent that the last time I touched the machine it was to unplug the Ethernet cable as a precaution against accidentally using a two-year out-of-date and out-of-support OS to check my e-mail.

I intended on upgrading it to Windows 10 but fell into one of the worst projects of my life that put it off for 3 months, I had already grown accustomed to using a new laptop, loaded with Tumbleweed which matched my work laptop and just never got around to it.

One of the de-motivators to that was expecting that I'd be forking out money for the upgrade. That's disappeared, now, and I had already planned on finding all of that out this weekend/doing it because I'm at the point where -- though there are one or two things that there is no Linux version of my preferred app, and either my muscle memory in that app is so strong that using the alternative is *tedius as hell, especially for a rare need*, is so bad that calling it an *alternative* is highly misleading. Plus, I'm sitting on a 2070 that I acquired from family near MSRP to add to its existing 1070s and I'm pretty sure my kids will kill me if I wait any longer.

Thanks for the info!
You're talking about opportunity cost, I don't know enough to speak to that, but that there is something else just as good or better doesn't make it any lesser.

At this point, the author of this article is more expert than I'll ever be, I'd assume that he has reasons to consider mRNA a low hanging fruit compared to existing tech like protein-subunit or adenovirus for infectious diseases.

And against DNA-based, well mRNA has beat it to the punch in being used at scale in humans, so that's possibly one advantage.
Can you provide some links where I could get this? I would be interested at this price point.
Linux distributions having 'OS' in their name is confusing.
> the idea that peaceful protesting or rule-abiding political opposition is generally effective.

I understand you are making a stylized appeal for liberal political change via violence. China's leadership has peaks and troughs of liberalism, and violence there, in the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran and in many other places around the world was followed more often by a hardening, not a softening, of daily life.

Violence in Hong Kong would delay liberalization and usher a vicious and oppressive crackdown.

> legitimization strategy for political changes that were already in development before the protest started.

Here you appear to know that the real strategy is waiting. Eventually, Xi will die, and it's more likely than not that his successors will liberalize.
Why were you trying to talk about a specific bridge if it didn't make any sense in context?
I'm not actually sure if you polled westerns that they would assume protests alone are the impetus for change, this may be a straw man.

A more generous line of thinking would be 'do peaceful protests help bring about change?', which many in the west would probably agree to, and many in HK probably not. And they'd both be right - peaceful protest likely works better in certain contexts (democracies) than others (authoritarian regimes).
I'd love to live in a world where AGI solves cancer.
with just greys (no color) and dithering, 16 greys is plenty
It’s a frustrating essay, because it comes close to having a helpful message. A phrase like “being engaged” seems closer to what he tries to get across, but a lot of young people will probably mostly take from this essay that they need to hustle, which is the kind of useful advice you’ll hear from a high school guidance counselor.
Is there any open source alternative to the kind of software this device runs on?
For those unaware, the CCP actually has police in foreign countries to find and arrest dissidents.

In some European countries, they have/had permission to operate freely.

In the US, the CCP police has been told to return home. But we'll see how that turns out.

This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of foreign espionage that the CCP is doing in the US.

You can read about the Thousand Talents program (turning scientists into spies), United Front (connected to BLM Inc.), Confucious Institutes (teaching CCP narrative to foreign children), and donations to US universities and media outlets. (The CCP donates money so that they can threaten to withold future donations later.)

(The Houston embassy was closed because of the above.)

Two Australian Senators recently resigned because they were actually CCP members.
> Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s?

This seems like luck to me[1]:

> [Mary Maxwell Gates'] tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career
Though global warming may eventually obviate this, I feel like the phrase “except Antarctica” can be omitted in most cases where it’s used.
Ah, yes. I trust the internet's wisdom about the aerospace industry. After all the armchair quarterbacking I've seen around every other aerospace event I can't imagine a more reliable source of speculation.
SARS-CoV-2 mutation escapes vaccine- and infection-induced CD8 T-cell responses
I think the criticism is not so illogical. Let's just assume your company has a 5% chance of wild success and you can double it by working insanely hard (I think these numbers are likely generous, but easier to take round numbers for the sake of argument). It is in this case simultaneously true that it's in VCs' interest to convince you to work very hard and also that it's probably not in your interest. It only makes sense for them to promote because the one or two lucky groups will make up for all the duds.
Antibiotics are not necessarily proteins but can be arbitrary ‘small molecules’ which could require a suite of enzymes instead of just one enzyme
i’m sort of a Luddite so take this with a grain of salt.

I don’t see this going anywhere.

If it’s really good and we can actually have 1 developer instead of 2 now why would any developer want to do this? this would basically be a piece of automation that diminishes the value we are creating.

If it’s crap it’s going to create mountains of verbosity and code written to pump up the LOC numbers. It’s terrible. After that you’re gonna end up maintaining and enhancing what an “ai” spew out.

I’m not buying the argument this is a problem that needs solving. It’s in the same vein with self driving cars. It looks impressive, it’s good PR, it’s absolutely insanely hard to get right and the benefits (even if we get it right) are questionable.

the way it was introduced is also disingenuous.
No, most so called "cryptocurrencies" are using lottery-based Proof-of-Work (puzzle solving) as a leader election mechanism for Byzantine consensus over the state of the distributed replicated ledger of transactions.

What described here is a simple probabilistic micropayments.
Since the payment transactions are expensive, you amortize the cost of many smaller "virtual" transactions over a single large real transaction. This scheme is frequently used in the API billing, or even for all-inclusive costs in hotels (i.e. you charge for the buffet instead of for each meal separately) and you hope that probabilistically it will end up OK.
The article mentions that municipal broadband networks in Ohio are now explicitly banned from applying/receiving new rounds of state grants. That’s part of this package.

> municipalities and electric cooperatives in the state do not have access to the proposed $250 million broadband expansion grant program that will be established
Of course not. But it's the restaurant you hate to go to now, because it just reminds you of how good it used to be.
Here you go: https://www.zoleo.com/en-au/satellite-communicator/. It switches seamlessly between wifi cellular and satellite
I downvoted you because it seems like your comment is largely composed of empty insults ("it's terrible", "reminded me of reddit's 'IAmVerySmart' sub", "weird rabbit-hole"). You don't give any examples for the specific criticism you make (circular logic). You say he fails to admit any possibility of error whereas I know that he readily admits the possibility of error.

There are also a few cases where your comment is misleading. You write that he isn't being banned, neglecting that his videos are being removed, his channel getting strikes, and his channel getting demonetized. YouTube is clearly censoring and suppressing his content and he is clearly on track to get banned. You say that some people have been made very sick ODing on Ivermectin, which is true, but only when they take massive amounts and is also true of the vast majority of drugs. Taking massive overdoses of anything is ill-advised. You write, again without explaining, that Ivermectin is a "very poor candidate as a treatment" - which is an odd claim to make given that Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and has at least some experimental data suggesting it may have uses. And, also, Ivermectin is being used in Latin America and India as a treatment currently. To sum that up as "a very poor candidate" strikes me as disingenuous.

Hope this help clarifies why at least one person is downvoting you.
- Natural monopolies don't exist. No inefficiency lasts long in a free market. There are areas with competition. Lifting regulations would create more. Or maybe most people are satisfied with the service they have.

- Competition is everywhere. Satellite is good enough for most people. Maybe it costs more. But you choose where to live.

- 5G and Starlink are about to change the game.
Been there! I went to contracting and saved money to keep me going for a year. I created a project which I thought it will be a side project and suddenly became a startup.

Almost 5 months in, I will never go back to a daily job. The pleasure of doing things my way, expanding my network, meeting other people who share the same passion and finally seeing the impact of what I am doing is priceless. I work longer hours than I used to but I've never been that happy for years.
Proper use of computers, Reading original sources
+1 Ecto is killer, not just the library itself but also how it provides a slick example of a DSL using Elixir macros. I used to love Elixir for the syntax and actor model, but macros have gotten me all hot and bothered.
This is a common complaint in just about any System76 thread, so I'd wager it's fairly valid at this point. Just because you're fine with it doesn't mean the average user wants that in 2021.
I appreciate you sharing your story! It's cool to hear about your success and I definitely understand that it's different than some might think of it. Congrats! I'll try not criticize your narrative or how you frame it and focus on sharing how I think about mine instead.

I'm American, white, male, and got into an American college. I studied economics in school, got super stressed about my debt and income inequality. So I came to SF after college, doubled down on my debt with a bootcamp, and got a high paying engineering job. It was a big, stressful risk and paid off. I paid all my student debt off in a few months. My life has been an absolute dream since. I would never, never in a million years say this:

> ...our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me

From working with those guys at the moving company I can tell you, seemingly small missteps lead to irreversible stagnation in traditional measures of success (career, achievement, wealth, etc). Let's cast all that aside though and just focus on demographics. Americans represent ~4% of the world's population. About 32% of Americans have graduated college. ALREADY I'm part of ~1% of the world's population and we haven't even included white/male. And I bet you like what half of SF engineers and YC founders fall in that population? Just incredibly disproportionate.

During the Great Depression stocks didn't rebound for 20 years. Over the last 20-40 years interest rates have steadily declined, ROI across the board has shrunk, and VC funds have proved highly profitable. All of that means that the last 20 years have been gangbusters for VC funding, SF, and software engineering. Had the next long protracted economic crisis hit during my job search, what would've happened? I was job searching for 6 months before I got my first job offer at a doctor's salary. What even is that!?

I worked hard, I was lucky, and I was successful. I don't even pretend to understand the cause and effect there.
Companies are democracies because they need the people involved to do stuff.

Just because most Americans are oin a position of either horrible conditions or death, doesn't mean they have to be.

It seems much more entitled to me that apples management expects to control where people are during the day, even after deriving all kinds of value from them
> there are practical applications for it right now

I'm flat out skeptical you're not just waving your hands in the air vaguely.

Provide concrete examples of how it's used right now then, specifically in a scenario where traditional techniques don't work.

Not, "look at this youtube video that took 80 hours to render a 800x800 pixel image for our paper"; an actual practical application.

I've never seen NeRF deployed in anything other than a proof of concept or toy scenario.
Whats the worst thing that happens if a talk goes poorly? Some loss of approval from peers? Why is this valued at all. It's not like any of those peers would have done it better.
Insurers still insure them so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Read the plan very carefully. The reason these plans are cheap is usually because they can and do take advantage of things the ACA specifically outlawed -- rescission, lifetime caps, claim denial, the aforementioned lack of preexisting condition coverage, etc.
More on Types with Uncle Bob Martin
Hongkongers are not protesting peacefully lol. They literally burned people that say that they love China.

I think it is a perfect case study on how creating chaos (running into parliament building and vandalise), doxxing and threaten the family of police officers and supporting Donald trump (for whatever reason) is not helping.
The search CGI script is broken :[
It's a design pattern that suggests that there is a feature missing from the language.

This is the part where I’ve been entertaining the idea of solving things at a language level (transpiler). It’s a dangerous idea because if we get better tools to extend the language and everyone does it, we’re all going to be fucked.

But I can’t shake the idea that some of our frameworks, if incorporated at a language level, could entirely eliminate the boilerplate.
I'm not saying you're going to be productive immediately, but the fundamentals are there and (with effort) you'll be able to get there.
Read Byung-Chul Han, he has some insights on this.
> Eventually, Xi will die, and it's more likely than not that his successors will liberalize

It is more likely there will be a contest for power.

It could become violent, though that is unlikely. In that event, I see no reason to ensure like-minded Chinese are sufficiently armed, or at the very least informed. China's path changed when Xi installed himself as dictator for life. It's foolish to ignore that seismic shift.