skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.
This is such a neat demo. I wrote up an annotated version of the code while I was figuring out exactly how it worked. https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/annotated-deno-deploy-dem...
It takes a long time to make by hand!
That's totally insane. I switched to Ego yard equipment maybe 5 years ago and it's so much better. I don't have to screw around trying to get the weedwhacker to run, nor the blower vac. No plumes of sooty smoke when I start the lawn mower. It all "just works".

I don't have a big yard, but the Ego stuff handles it well. My only gripe is in the fall (New England, so lots of leaves) I only really get 15-20 mins of runtime on the blower. Having said that, I have several other batteries including the big one for the mower so by cycling through them I can get the cleanup done.

I think that for a landscaping company, it'd be tough to go (battery) electric, at least without having a big library of batteries. Doable, but probably takes some commitment to the environment vs profit.
Probably that if there were bad side effects from coffee or tea, we’d know about it. Like we know about alcohol’s.
Google Flights routinely serves me economy class seats as business or flight prices suddenly change on last screen or you have to call a phone to book...
What's impractical about it?
;,)
I've got to say it's a good thing that I'm not hired to write blog posts. Thanks for sharing your opinion! Every critique helps to build valuable skills.
>It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar.

Keep in mind US prices don't include sales tax (VAT).
In particular, I'm skeptical of the real expected cost savings over time. Electricity is cheaper than gasoline, but batteries for portable equipment tend to be very expensive, and how long do they last? Especially since manufacturers have historically changed the battery interface substantially every few years, forcing people to upgrade their equipment. Maybe that's changing, though, it does seem like the latest iteration of DeWalt batteries have been around considerably longer than the previous generation was.
Unreal Engine is fairly easy to get started with, and has VR support.
https://reactual.com/home-and-garden/quietest-leaf-blower-20...

Electric leaf blowers average 65db, 4 strokes are 70-80db, while 2 strokes average 90db. Where 10db is roughly double the "noise" I think this qualifies for "significantly"
Programmers don't write code on whiteboards.

If it was just a matter of determining if they can code or not references and prior work should be sufficient.

The real reason they exist is to filter for culture fit without having deal with the associated law suits if this was done outright.
I don't think IQ is supposed to measure the "innate" intelligence, just the intelligence. Things like being malnourished, having lead in your water/food, CO2 levels, etc will make a population less intelligent.
https://i.imgur.com/9pNtm2O.png
You're right on the money. Although I'm definitely adding a copy editor to my list of things to invest in ASAP.
I used to joke Ryanair makes money by selling tickets, vapes and (soon) condoms.

TBH still kinda good airline for short flights. It's the clientele that makes it less palatable.
Theater for the masses, none of it matters....
The work visa is very easy to get if you have an engineering degree, as long as a company will hire/sponsor you.
The electric ones are great.
You have to start somewhere, the easiest way is to ban new sales as that is what you can enforce without too much expense (both financial and political). Then as old machines slowly fail, most people will buy new electric ones. And if there are still 100s or 1,000s of people stubbornly using their petrol powered tools, at least there are no 100,000s or 1,000,000s of them.
I can unplug and re-plug in my physical raspi. If I'm renting a remote raspi, I expect the same ability to do so.
This is emissions of miscellaneous hydrocarbons, NO, NO₂, and CO. Not CO₂.

If you add a catalytic converter etc. you could cut most of it. But then the engine would be much bulkier and more expensive.
Totally agreed with you, but I don't even understand why people can't understand your point. It's obvious enough. Taking leetcode for interview is like memorizing all english vocabulary needed for SAT/GRE. Taking CS course in university is like learning how to write an essay properly.

Asking engineers to take leetcode for exams is like asking journalists to take the SAT exam. Obviously they will need to study a few months for such things.
> It was only a few decades ago when Tokyo was famous for having the most expensive real estate in the world.

Yes, but then they did something about it [1] instead of pulling up the ladder behind them.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
Unless it's an actual hard conversation and you're not allowed to talk about it without HR present. Those are great fun...
Awww ;) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=i+love+you
This is a good start to reducing noise pollution. Motorcycles and mustangs next.
If you shift the mean slightly the tails move disproportionately more.
I’ve heard so in terms of affordability. And good point about roommates, etc. And these are averages so keep that in mind.
Because it's clear from anybody who knows the details about it that crypto is the basis for the next-generation of the financial system.
Singularity – Open Source Container System for Secure High Performance Computing
I had an ac electric blower growing up in the 90s.
In the Raptor's case, the ambient air contained 2.821 ppm of total hydrocarbons, and the amount of total hydrocarbons coming out the Raptor's tailpipe measured 2.639 ppm.

What's the point of comparing small outdoor engines to things that don't emit hydrocarbons?
The 2 stroke leaf blower is literally burning oil to run, so the emissions are much, much worse. (that's how 2 stroke engines work).

Also note your ride on mower (and other small IC things) don't have catalytic converters or anything at all to manage emissions, so the stuff coming out the exhaust is multiple orders of magnitudes worse - especially for the user who is standing right there breathing it in.

It isn't just about gallons consumed per hour, it's about what comes out the exhaust.
No I don't. AT ALL. It sounds to me like you've never encountered actual challenging engineering problems. If you have had anything to do with 3GPP all the algorithms used in there are a lot more complex than these silly compsci interview algorithms. You don't really spend that much time thinking about things that should be considered basic vocabulary.

I also had countless experiences where I ended up either rewriting from scratch or massively refactoring code that was written by computer scientists that dumped all their algorithm ideas into code without understanding a thing about performance, the underlying infrastructure or how to trace it.

Your sorting algorithm will mean jackshit when you spend all your time doing I/O reading files in and out of memory for example. Your super cool distributed algorithm means nothing if you don't understand CPU P-States(I guess that's irrelevant nowadays) or NUMA and didn't setup the machine properly.

I for one have opted out of this BS and will actively avoid mediocre programmers trying to boost their ego with cookiecutter algorithm questions.
This is thrilling to see and read, but a few paragraphs and photos in I get a sad nagging feeling knowing that today this type of thing would likely get us complicated or put in trouble in so many different ways (USA). I keep thinking "how dangerous it is to have photo evidence of this", and it overrides the part of my brain thinking "this is a story for the ages, and I'm glad there is photo evidence of this".
We built an artificial DNA-based recording system named DNA Ticker Tape
My grandmother's townhouse had a 6 x 8' strip of grass to mow, and had a plug in mower. It worked great.

I'm all for picking the tools that work best for your situation. But don't say, "And I hereby decree that everyone will now use this technology."
I think it highly depends on what kind of math you're expecting (and how heavily you want to rely on a CAS). If most of your work is just simplifying equations and computing numerical solutions, basically any system will do whether that's Octave, Sympy + Numpy, etc.

I haven't used Maple for a while so can't speak to it's current functionality but there's been several times I've wanted to do something in Sympy/Octave and haven't found it whereas I can almost always get Mathematica to do what I want with a quick search. I tend to rely heavily on it for some more complicated/specific symbolic operations (e.g. symbolically transforming probability distributions) and for that use case, I haven't found anything better.

I'll also say that if your use case if more numerical/programming oriented, the language used might be an important factor. I personally don't like Wolfram Language and use very few of its language features and prefer Python for anything that Mathematica isn't suited for out of the box.
No, the battery electric blowers, weedwhackers, chainsaws and mowers are significantly quieter than their gasoline powered brethren.

(source: I switched to Ego battery electric yard equipment from gas powered ones a few years ago).
Learning and building stuff won't help you pass these interviews.

Which is ironic but it also means that applying for a company that uses such interviews is a completely different task to becoming a better engineer.

Personally I avoid such places, there is sufficiently good compensation available elsewhere from people that don't expect me to perform parlour tricks on a whiteboard for their amusement.
The test is measuring emissions, not efficiency. From the link:

The Results
During the FTP 75 test, exhaust gas from the vehicle's tailpipe is captured and analyzed by laboratory-grade equipment that's so expensive it makes the Kentucky Derby look like the Pinewood Derby. This lab equipment measures all kinds of compounds coming out of the tailpipe but the three we will focus on are those with which EPA and CARB are primarily concerned, namely, non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC), oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO).

(then there's a table listing the results...)
Man if this is actually GPT-3 publishing under a pseudonym I am totally going to have to revise my comment…
The fast-food workers’ season of rebellion
> It always bothered me how a user-hostile piece of software like git rapidly took over the world.

Why people bother getting a passport, going to an airport, going through security and sharing the ride squeezed along with hundreds of other passengers? Because the alternatives suck in comparison. My last job was one of those corporations that refused to use git because "our devs don't like CLI and git is not as intuitive as Team Foundation". Thankfully after having prospect employees and consultants laughed in their face during interviews they got the message and they switched. But those two years I had to work without git were very depressing.

Here are the reasons git was very quickly adopted:

* Better history aka not everything is a linear list of commits. Merging used to be only comparing naively two file filesystems. There was no notion of checking if changes were already applied. Now merging is reduced to the lowest amount of conflict possible; assuming you know are working along the hash enforced DAG. It was so hard that there used to people called integrators solely dedicated to merge the work of others; they still exist in some projects such as the Linux kernel but they are part of the approval process, not merging itself.

* Centralization sucked and the very notion of distributed version control didn't even exist.

* Branches are cheap. Remember, at the time there used to be flame wars about branches. This really made prototyping hard and inefficient and the only way was to copy the whole project.

* Speed. Centralized systems are inherently slow because the fact that everything is done relative to a server means that nearly every operation involve an online communication and processing from a remote machine. Git is instantaneous for 99% of the commands entered. Being fast also helps developers to not take shortcuts and making sure that what they push is clean and well divided in small and intelligible commits.

* Extreme redundancy. Having the full historic means not having to worry about "the server" getting hacked or the backups failing.

* Flexibility. How do I stash some temporary changes? How do I edit my history before pushing? How do I commit only a few lines at a time? How to I apply the changes of a few selected commits? How do I apply and check a patch file?

* Simple data structures and abstractions. There is no incompatible database schema involved here. Content is addressed and verified by hashes who reference other hashes. A 2005 git repository is still readable in 2021 and beyond. New tools and framework can and has been built around git for that very reason. Other CVS have to do their own mediocre versions.
Thanks! There was a good GDC talk from a Forza guy too that came to mind after reading your comment. Hmm lemme see if I can dig it up...aahh yup, here it is:

https://youtu.be/COqSiGFnK50
My father is a licensed landscape contractor in Menlo Park (the same place where this law change was written). For 30 years I have watched (and helped) him with jobs almost always involving small off-road internal combustion tools. He works 6 day work weeks and easily 10h+ a day. His small truck fleet not only includes lawn mowers, blowers, and edge cutters, but also a trencher, a compactor, and a couple pumps.

As well intentioned as this law change is it will only make a hard job even harder. Battery cost, battery swaps and reparability, battery theft, arguing with locals who still will still yell at him for being "too loud".... it's just not going to happen or be worth it. He will continue to buy tools from places with lower sales tax and there is no possible way you can argue that an electric trencher or compactor is going to work for more than a couple hours a day without a repeated battery swaps. Have you even seen how large the properties are in Woodside, Atherton, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, and Cupertino? Those kinds of jobs are impossible with electric tools. Sorry, not sorry.
Keep in mind this is not carbon dioxide (the greenhouse gas). These are other emissions that come from these less cleaner engines.
Right. I think saying 'Vim/Emacs aren't as good as other editors because they're unapproachable to new learners' is like saying 'Linux is a worse OS than Windows because it's hard to use'. -- Sure, you want something to be accessible to everyone. But there's also a benefit to enabling power-users to learn the system.

That said, kakoune looks like an interesting demonstration that maybe vim's <action><text selection> commands could be clearer as <text selection><action>.
"People are circumventing a law that attempts to protect the environment, therefore we shouldn't even bother".

Yes, of course people will always look for ways around a law.. but if even 50% can't be bothered to go around it, that will be an enormous reduction in emissions.
I was talking to my landscaper recently about them. Said they’ve improved but still not as good as an ICE. And they work on efficiency. I assume he knows what he’s talking about as every landscaper near me uses gas. If electric was a better option I assume they’d use them.
For skilled people it’s one of the easiest places to get a visa. Unlike US, Canada and Europe which are the other places I’m familiar with, there’s no requirement for companies to try to hire locally first.

There’s also a points system to fast track getting a visa. This can also get you a permanent visa in one year.

During Covid all of this is virtually stopped, but starting to open back up starting tomorrow, Nov 8.
The fundamental idea behind this of, "Here, take this shiny object that may or may not have some value at some point in exchange for enslaving your most personal data to us who want to work for 'your own good'" is just shitty and elitist regardless of how its pursued.

Also,
>Trying to tear people down who pretty clearly seem to be making a good faith attempt to make the world a better place is reprehensible in my opinion.

Seriously? What an absurd notion. Oh hey, X attempt was in good faith! What a terrible person you are for criticizing it... Not to compare Altman with people like Lenin but I suppose that by this logic, one is bad for criticizing revolutionary demagogues because their hearts were always in the right place?
Thanks for the advice. It really has motivated me. It's good to know that you do not need to know everything in a language to become competent, my perfectionist self often approaches learning in an all-or-nothing manner.
If you appreciate bullet journaling (and you should), gotta love the simplicity and effectiveness of https://rocketlog.app
> takes some commitment to the environment vs profit

What it takes is government regulation.
It can be worse than that. I remember the poor Rakuten folks being under a 3 strike system if they arrived after 9:30AM at Crimson House.

It definitely created an unnecessary morning rush at Futako Tamagawa.
I think this is actually the system working. The benefits of a tiny proportion of the population (lawn care companies) don’t outweigh everyone else. As a whole, the people decided that clean air and less noise pollution warranted a change. Maybe it will cost more in the near term to achieve those goals. But, it’s a level playing field. The costs will not be borne by the lawn care companies but by society at large. If the price of providing lawn care truly goes up then all lawn care providers will charge more. Society at large was already paying the costs of air / noise pollution.
It depends where in Japan. Homes in Tokyo are poorly insulated. Homes in Hokkaido are usually pretty decent.
I don't understand why CA keeps passing these sorts of laws. It makes them a subject of ridicule, the laws are more or less completely ignored, and the underlying structural problems behind the issue are never solved. If they really wanted to be "progressive" on Climate Change, they could discourage buying and shipping cheap goods from overseas. But that might make their wealthy donors unhappy.
> I just cross - can’t take the New Yorker out of me.

Yup, Americans leave this impression all over the world. Loud, obnoxious tourists who don't think local laws and norms apply to them.
PGP sucks in general. But it seems to be the only thing in it's own space. When will there be a viable alternative to it?

age doesn't support signing, keys are meant to be ephemeral. minisign/signify are not a suitable equivalent and are more suited to signing+verifying software releases.
Arbitrarily banning sales of such items sounds suspicious.

If it's about pollution, the *use* of highly polluting things should be made illegal, including many cars and SUVs.

If it's about noise, ban the *use* of noisy things, including leaf blowers, motorbikes and so on.

How comes existing ICE vehicles get a pass?
I'm just complaining about "right angled planets." Sounds like a Tetris piece orbiting a star.
Hmmm... this earlier link seems to work: https://web.archive.org/web/20170723102426/http://www.boston...
A few cities have startup visas now, which give you a year or two to meet the capital requirements.
Well, importantly, or not so importantly. Focus on CO2 over pollutants that actively harm the health of everyone in the vicinity is the same scam that got us diesel cars.
Hey, I get it. I totally understand if writing "there was an overwhelming feeling" seems more correct to you. But my goal is to relay a message as I hear it from the target audience which explains a lot of those strategic choices I made in the blog post (trust me, me and Google spell check were good friends throughout the writing process). But I try not to use Google spell check like it's a God. More like a helpful angel on my shoulder.
Well two-stroke burns the oil as well, so that should be a big difference right there.

The car should also have a more efficient combustion, due to all the electronics, along with a catalytic converter to meet the emission requirements.

Note they talk about hydrocarbon emissions, not just CO2.
But look at zoning in CA and the infinite logjam of traffic on the highways. I hardly doubt leaf blowers make anywhere near a dent policies that a really affect people’s lives would. It’s a joke really.
I'm not generally a big government person, but in some cases (like this!) I totally agree!
California seems to make this well-intentioned-but-bad lawmaking mistake way more often than other places.

Why is that?
Errrrr no it doesn't?
> mixed recycle bins

Recycling is a scam so there's no point. It all goes to the landfill.
I've bought three of them -- I'm actually using DeWalt because of that. But the batteries all arrived and refused to charge. I probed them with a multimeter, and found the cell voltage was quite low. Hooking it up to a constant current lab supply for ~30 minutes raised the cell voltage enough to get the charger to accept it... but I've only had one run with them. I hope they'll work again.
Hyperglycemic Emergencies Associated with Covid Vaccination: A Case Series
If you mean school, the first 10 years of grade school are basically glorified daycare. The remaining 2 (hopefully) teach you how to think and prepare you for college. That's why in countries which actually do care about their high-IQ kids (US is not one of them) they remove kids who aren't pulling their weight and send them to vocational schools.

College (at least for me) was darn near useless - 95% of the skills I use daily were self-taught. I could just take calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations and call it a day. Most people don't even need that much.

I _really_ wish college wasn't a requirement in our field. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that for a sufficiently motivated, moderately smart person looking to learn how to code, college is a horrible waste of time and money, unless they're looking to learn something highly specialized, and/or are looking for an advanced degree. They'd be much better off pair programming with someone experienced, as an apprentice, and they'd be making money and acquiring real experience while learning. The same is true for quite a few other professions as well.
I teach high school math. My kids use it all the time! This isn't entirely a bad thing. It's a very, very useful (and natural language) symbolic integrator for them.
You also don't need to eat that much less if you're at a stable weight. 10% less a day means you lose a pound every 1-2 weeks. In my experience people seem to not like it when you tell them, after they ask, that you lost weight simply by eating a bit less every day consistently for a year.
Capital One has that

Sort of.

Do they still require using Chrome for that feature?

Fuck Google, I'm not about to use them for that!
Ignorance and posturing. The people making the laws don't do any of the hard work.
Look elsewhere in this thread, your gut feeling is very, very wrong:

"To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Ford Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska"

https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-...