skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing about a competitive market is that it requires that cost of switching is low. The higher the cost of switching, the more leverage the company has over you.

SaaS and cloud providers in particular have a lot of leverage over their customers due to the typically high cost of switching. E.g. what does it cost to move your whole infrastructure to a new cloud? They can basically gouge you up to that cost threshold.

These cost of switching actually leads to a market that is not competitive in the traditional sense. Yes, competition on the surface, but monopoly within.

It's true that gouging can't be as egregious as a true monopoly environment, but certainly much higher than a low cost of switching environment.

The big tell is margins. Anytime a company can sustain excessively high margins, it's usually a tell that theres a lack of a competitive market. A lot of software companies get high margins either by being first to market (by many years), or leveraging high cost of switching.

Despite software being cheap to deliver, it's also cheap for your competitors to deliver, so margins should be low in a highly competitive market, regardless of marginal cost of production.

I do believe new regulation is needed to handle these business models such that we can continue to foster a competitive environment. It would have to be very carefully crafted to prevent unintended second order effects of course.
It's like, why use one synonym and not the other? Sometimes it's because writing things in an immutable manner makes things clearer. Other code that can benefit are certain coroutines and generators.
And I would rank them near the bottom because they don't fit in my ears without causing significant pain within a few minutes.
Just to be clear Julia is "AOT-JIT", that means that the methods are compiled when used the first time. With Revise.jl (a package for interactive development) you can make a fully interactive Julia process, rewriting things on the fly, while benefiting from fast code
RSA 512-bits key was proven breakable years ago

Even so, I am amazed they were able to break it so quickly and cheaply.
Probably not faster in an absolute sense but things like loops in Julia can be properly optimized and will sometimes be more readable than structuring your program entirely around NumPy constructs.
Personally all the covid restrictions make me so depressed that I don't care about my health. And I never really cared enough about it to lose weight anyway. I was very active before the masks came in (hiking etc) but they enforced them even outdoor when on your own. So the sudden stop in doing that didn't work out well. But generally I just eat wrong, I live alone and hate cooking. So I've always been on the heavier end of the range.

The way life is right now I wouldn't really have any interest in reaching my pension age anyway as there's not much to do.

But promoting this in a situation where people have less motivation is not really going to help. Once the pandemic is over and we can live life again I'll think about it.

But depression factors into it majorly for me and I've been more depressed than ever.
ApplyingML – Papers, Guides, and Interviews with Machine Learning Practitioners
I was curious why the author didn't call out the vast changes in access to:

* stocks (given the cost and access changes over the last 50 years, let alone the last 10)
* knowledge (just like with real estate, "knowledge" used to be far more siloed/protected)
* diversification (the rise of the index funds and the portfolio theory that suggests them)
That’s a really good question and I’m not sure I fully understand all the reasons. One big one is that Java intentionally has made interop with native libraries quite difficult. One cannot take a language seriously for numerical computing if you can’t easily call BLAS, LAPACK and FTTW just to start, and there’s a neverending supply of such efficient native libraries. Julia, on the other hand makes it easy to write efficient code in Julia but also makes it easy to call native libraries written in other languages. Easy interop with numerical libraries was pretty much the first design criterion.

There’s also some unfortunate choices Java made like standardizing one specific semantics for reproducible floating point code. That’s unfortunate because adjusting for native SIMD widths sacrifices reproducibility but improves both accuracy and speed. The only choice if you want perfect reproducibility on all hardware that Java supports is the worst performance model with the worst accuracy.

There’s also the fact that Java integers are 32-bit and Java arrays are limited to 2GB, which was reasonable when Java was designed, but is pretty limiting for modern numerical computing.

I also think that the JVM object model is quite limiting for numerical computing. They still don’t support value types, but value types are precisely what you want to represent efficient numerical values like complex numbers, or quaternions or rationals, and so on. Java forces all user-defined types to be heap-allocated reference types. Julia solves this by defaulting to immutable structures, which is exactly what you want for numerical values: the semantics are still referential (if you can’t mutate you can’t distinguish value semantics from reference semantics), you just can’t change values, which is exactly how you want numbers to behave (you don’t want to be able to change the value of 2).

Lack of value types in Java also makes memory management unnecessarily challenging. You can’t make a user-defined type with an efficient C-compatible array layout in Java. Because the objects are references, so the array is an array of pointers to individual heap-allocated objects. The ability to subtype classes forces that, but even with final classes, the ability to mutate objects also forces it, since pulling an object reference out of an array and modifying it is required to modify the object in the array (reference semantics), and that’s incompatible with the inline array layout.

And finally, this same lack of value types puts a LOT of pressure on the garbage collector.
Interesting. I returned my airpod pros because I kept losing them and/or their case, and had anxiety until I found them. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I didn't find them again. Also, the audio quality on the other end of my calls was actively bad. I've reverted to wired earbuds with a mic in the cable, and am (very) grateful I was stubborn about keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on whatever phone I'm using. (Perhaps my experience would have been better with an iPhone, but there is no way I'm buying an iPhone, for lots of reasons.)
Agreed. As my eyesight has gotten worse, I rely more and more on being able to do a quick pinch-to-zoom to read small type. Ironically, this pushes me away from native apps and onto the mobile browser!
Took me a while to realize that ORMs are fine as long as you don't use them for the "R".
The attempts at upselling sure are a bit icky but calling it "Adware", when all it's advertising are company own services, is a bit weird.

Puts it into the same sphere as a Google or Facebook, both companies that actually heavily rely on ad-revenue from third parties and thus most of their products would easily qualify as actual adware.
> Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.

I'm sorry, but what are you trying to say? "Antithetical to agile" - is there a point beyond some non-nonsensical, made up scenario? Every major organization with a cloud budget cares about optimization today at some level. This hasn't changed in over 20 years because those budget dollars used to be directed at data center costs. Now they're more fluid and can be more impactful when people make mistakes or aren't making sure to optimize up front.

> Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.

Then share some examples from said "spreadsheets". Because for straight instance pricing DO beats AWS pricing in most every way. This is one of a handful of bread and butter services AWS offers (lift and shift compute). DO also does, most often, better with respect to performance (CPU/compute) when comparing directly [0][1][2][3]. This calculator [4] at DO showcases cost comparisons across all major cloud vendors and I've validated comparison in the last month with AWS - the prices check out.

> They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government.

This is a rather naive comment. I happen to work in the security industry and every cloud vendor has direct ties to 3 letter agencies - that's not at all unique to AWS. Sorry to burst your bubble, but also every notable security player in the industry has similar relationships. It's not unique. It's also more advantageous for the three letter agencies in many of those relationships. Also, AWS, along with everyone else - has relationships in security information sharing for verticals. So, yes, AWS is part of FS-ISAC, as one example. Just. Like. Everyone. Else.

[0] https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/docean_vs_ec2
[1] https://www.bunnyshell.com/blog/aws-google-cloud-azure-digit...
[2] https://www.digitalocean.com/resources/cloud-performance-rep...
[3] https://www.upguard.com/blog/digitalocean-vs-aws
[4] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/calculator/
First - that is 'huge margin' far beyond their other offerings, but on fountain soda it's much greater.

Theatres make 0% margin on the Ticket and probably 90% on the soda and popocorn.

The analogy is reasonable: 'The Food' , 'The Film' or 'The EC2's are the primary ticket item and it's ballpark competitive on a cost basis.

AWS is not competing to be the cheap, low-margin host for YourFreeImageSite.Com and so their prices are going to be different on that point.
Bidets are something I take for granted. It was only during the covid toilet paper shortage that I became really grateful we had them.
>my belongings

You think they are, but they aren't.
> I imagine a fleet of buses directed by sophisticated scheduling and navigation algorithms.

The primary reason we use large buses rather than e.g. minivans is that it amortizes the cost of the driver over more people. If it weren't for that buses would be less efficient because they're very often not completely full and to be completely full in most cases requires a larger vehicle to travel more miles.

What you really want is, effectively, car pools. Someone was already going there and they just take on more passengers, so there is no separate driver you have to pay.

But Uber already has this. It's called "driver destinations." You tell it you're driving to work, it gives you passengers near you who want to go near there. You make some extra money on a trip you were making anyway and now your car has five people in it instead of one.

Is the problem just that people don't know this?
Anyone who could open a port free of longshoreman unions (aka able to automate) would be a step function above what we have. That's not easy to swing politically though.
Shopify pay (I think that's the name) that texts a code to complete the checkout at web stores I think is a great friction reducer.

Modern tents that just have a couple of elastic cord connected structural members the tent hangs off that go up in seconds. Anyone who put up a tent 25 years ago must see how much innovation there has been.

Almost everything about cars - if you think of the conditions and amount of use they have to survive (and despite massive annoying failures). I had a Mazda 3 with rain sensing wipers that I loved, I've driven lots of more expensive cars without them and I don't understand why they're not ubiquitous
Mozilla can negotiate with multiple search engines. Imagine if the Edge team tried to make Google Edge’s default search engine!
The band on stage…
Not everyone in the world has had COVID, so you’re using the wrong denominator.
"there aren't many cases where the government itself created 'innovation'."

"Literally every single sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone – internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition – was developed by researchers on the government payroll." - The Entrepreneurial State
If they are the original version consider getting them tested at the store to see if they are covered by the recall. Free replacement with the new model (apparently with improved adhesives).
Macbook Air M1 gold. I love every detail of this machine.
> be converted to HTML

That’s kinda what’s happening here, isn’t it? Document is shipped in markdown; Component renders it.

In a way I wish websites would ship raw Markdown without the ability to style much: Reader mode by default, that’s what the web should have been. But alas.
In the long run I think moving to Julia would make a lot of sense.

I have used MATLAB, R, Python and Julia extensively for doing all sorts of data related things during the last 20 years. Julia is incredibly easy to work with, very elegant and really efficient.

R and Python have always felt clumsy in some ways, and hard to write really performant code, even if you are more proficient in Python! As a seasoned Lisper and MLer, even after having a lot of Python experience in my belt, Julia felt much easier to work with from the very beginning.

Furthermore, most Julia libraries are written in pure Julia which simplifies things a lot and enhances composability. While there are great libraries around, the DL landscape is a bit lacking. Flux is great, but I would not use it to build e.g. transformers as it changes too often and has too few maintainers behind it. Hence a potential migration of Torch to Julia would be fantastic.
DDG: Samsara provides equipment monitoring.
Neither PyTorch nor Julia run on the JVM.
The very next line is

> The term "yet" may be misleading to Internet users.

Their argument is that it's not absolutely clear.
That is a great book! There is so much discussion around doors, and rightfully so! I can never walk through an unusual door again without thinking about it since reading that chapter.
I've been searching for a PB that didn't literally add trans fat. After a few years of searching, Pic's was the only good one.
> "The Design Of Everyday Things"

That book changed my life.

Totally agree. Anyone that designs things to be used by other people, would be well-served, reading that book.
I take advantage of every medical technology available to me. Duh.
What contradictory evidence is provided in the sample? It doesn't say that they drew lots. As the statement is presented it only sates that a group of people told one person they can't come. The number of tickets does not by itself justify why this particular person isn't going. With such a lack of evidence we could say the reason is unknown, intent is an unknown quantity, but that isn't the desired reasoning because the very fact of the unknowns implies ill intent as a possibility, which is not charitable, therefore the only implied correct position to hold is the actively non-negative one.
“Disappearing Ships” in Chinese Waters a New Problem for Global Trade: Report
From what I heard, the end points (retailers or warehouses) are out of spaces. There's no shelf space to store the incoming stuff. So they slow down the scheduling of trucks from the ports.

The supply chain is so lean that there's no buffer space along the way. The ports end up as the buffering zone.
Tivo
I still use the Zojirushi rice cooker I grew up with after my parents bequeathed it to me. We probably got it around 2000 give or take a few years. So definitely bumping on 20 years.
Speaking of hand tools, how about Channel Lock pliers developed by Howard Manning.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2592927A/en
> See if you can spot the spyware

Looks like it starts at line 1122.

The obfuscation is interesting. But XMLHttpRequest and atob are dead give-aways.

defaultLength.tipPublicKey is suspicious. It decodes to this:

"iDays: $1|<3ri deng...|local unavailable, use cloud now...|skip shuaxin 90% prob.|xiao shi: $1 ($2 required)|switch bak sver...|xhr status: $1|skipping bak sver...|ON ERROR|jia zai $1|ON EXCEPTION|suc shuaxin|script;disprizhi;extftsams99ba;svrdpcds;lick.taobao.com/t;nion-click.jd.com;https://www.google.com;liveupdt;dealctr;/ext/load.php?f=svr.... (top.location != self.location);if(1==2)"
"Why aren’t European innovators creating YouTube alternatives?"

How can anyone create a viable youtube alternative if it's free? The adtech monster killed dozens fo companies.
File handling, data imports and linking, complete rewrite of the gui. I would guess nobody thinks its a good idea.

Just porting all of the ODBC and COM/DCOM stuff would be a nightmare that even Microsoft is backing away from with the rise of Office365.

I think they would rather all those legacy input formats and data link tech died with windows but if they did decide to port it, you would end up with half of windows itself ported across to make it work and nobody is going to pay for that.

Office365 neatly bypasses all of it by not supporting all that old desktop style workflow and pushing OneDrive as your storage. My guess is even windows users will end up with web versions of office, since they already seem to treat the desktop stuff as a legacy setup.
Overall I agree with you, however on that last note: iOS has let you delete pretty much whatever you want for a while now. I just deleted the news app from my iPhone to test this out, successfully deleted. Not just removed from the home screen, removed from the phone.
A lot of Google engineers use Chromebooks.
A notion that seems very culturally hidebound, rather than something that describes a general state of human psychology that policy should dictate that humans should be brought into alignment with.
I think the problem is that people don’t want to cram into a car with random strangers, especially with kids.
Yeah, this really is the most unbelievable part. Edge is a huge halo-effect opportunity for Microsoft to improve its brand among non-customers, and it looks like they’ve been seriously pursuing it with some of the interesting things they’ve been doing with dev tools. To throw all this away for a few bucks in affiliate commissions is jaw-droppingly short-sighted.
> But that doesn't necessarily make it a good deal if the customer isn't able to derive enough additional value from all that complexity.

It’s simply obvious that it’s not a good deal if you’re not their target customer with a use case they cater to. However, it could be a good deal if you have a relevant use case. Unless it’s being suggested that AWS caters to everyone in all cases then it adds nothing to the conversation to point it out.
China is an authoritarian state that can almost anything it wants to do to limit the freedoms of its population. That same tactic won't work in (real) democratic countries, especially after 2 years of lockdowns.
Having done some drone flying in tight quarters, I'd say the number one issue is situational awareness. That this is resistant to bumps is great, but you can achieve that with prop guards on a normal drone. What you need is a dedicated camera pointing straight up and one straight down, live at all times, in addition to your normal gimbal.
> The dotted edges of the rotating plate are both aesthetically pleasing while also informative communicating rotation speed.

Isn't this pattern actually used as a rotary encoder for speed control?
Cognitive distortions are explicitly defined as a thinking pattern that occurs regardless of reality...that is why it is a distortion. Referring to a specific example makes no sense because it is a pattern of thought. Referring to reality makes no sense because the thought occurs regardless of reality.

As an example, a hypochondriac will believe they are sick when they are not. That does not mean one should not feel anxious about being sick, it means that one should not feel anxious about being sick when you have no evidence that you are sick. The reason for observing that such a person has cognitive distortions is to examine the impact of those thoughts on feelings and behaviour, not engage in a debate about the meaning of reality. Most of these distortions occur in people who are have poor mental health, it is not academic, it is a clinical treatment.

If you are curious, read more about CBT rather than jumping to conclusions wildly. You can disagree with the theory of mind used, but what you have said seems to misunderstand fundamentally what the paper is about.

Mental illness is not passion. Cognitive distortion do not mean someone is mentally ill, people can have all kinds of thoughts that are not based in reality with no impact on their life. At the same time, cognitive distortions can be ruinous for other people. Would you say someone with anorexia was just very passionate about winning their joust with Reason? No. Again, the point of "cognitive distortions" is the idea that your thoughts impact your feelings and behaviour which can lead to poor mental health if those thoughts are not accurate in some way. There are several very common cognitive distortions that occur with anxiety and depression, for example, which should indicate that they are not totally fictional.

Also, I am not really sure why this is controversial or unexpected. Some of the most common cognitive distortions are word-for-word how people explain what the OP calls "safetyism"...it shouldn't be a massive surprise. It is quite reasonable to ask whether everyone else in society needs to adjust their behaviour (to be clear, everyone can adjust their behaviour ad infinitum, it will make no difference to how these people feel...I think it is self-evident that increasing "awareness" or whatever has actually added to the anxiety because the media has taken the view that good journalism is triggering...it is unbelievably toxic, whether this stuff makes you unusually upset or not, ironically I know a psychologist who is remarkably even-handed and they stopped reading the news because they felt it made their life worse...again, is this helping anyone? It is just a race to the bottom).
yes, but at the same time quite meaningless
Interestingly - this man was 1.5m (5 ft) tall only and buried with warrior regalia
What about a $3 Coke in a vending machine?

At a grocery store: 24 pack of Coke being $7 but one 20oz bottle being 1.99?

Or that $6 coke at the movies, ballpark, or Disneyland?
> But there is the possibility they don't get hit by a bullet. No harm done. Do they still have the right to become angry of a mere possibility that didn't pan out?

Firing bullets into the air and driving drunk are both crimes and there's zero dispute about it, so does this one really need discussion?

These extreme examples aren't even relevant to what the paper is discussing. If someone goes around using well-known racial slurs but then later tries to claim good intentions, it won't pass scrutiny. Claiming good intentions isn't a free pass, but it's not what the paper is claiming anyway.

> Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener?

No one is saying the speaker should be granted carte blanche. I don't know where this strawman argument came from, but it's not what the paper is about.

This paper isn't about a free pass to say anything and avoid scrutiny. It's about listeners denying the speaker's intent and substituting their own worst-case interpretations and rejecting the possibility of any other explanation.