skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've seen a similar technique used two prove the product rule in analysis. I always find ways of avoiding such tricks because I see them as Deus Ex Machinas. I don't think of mathematics as an exercise in ill-motivated tricks.

Just to expand on this thought... in logic, "cut elimination" is a desirable property to have in a logical system. The "cut" rule states that, if you've proved "A -> B" (A implies B) and "B -> C", then you're licensed to deduce "A -> C". But in the statement "A -> C", B doesn't ever have to appear on its own, so if you're working backward, the "B" that splits the problem into two pieces can appear deeply unmotivated and appear out of nowhere.

A deductive system with the "cut elimination" property means that, whenever you have a proof that uses "cut", there's always a way to transform the proof into one that doesn't use "cut". Put less precisely, there's always a proof that doesn't use any unmotivated variables. (In computer science terms, "cut" is like implementing a function in terms of an existing function; you can always inline the original and then simplify the resulting code.)

"Cut elimination" is desirable because it makes automatic reasoning tractable. If you want to prove "A -> C", rather than trying to discover some arbitrary "B" that produces more tractable goals "A -> B" and "B -> C", there are (usually) only finitely many deductive steps that could terminate in "A -> C", and you can simply try each one.

Although humans aren't machines, creativity is still difficult in fields we're not accustomed to. While adding and subtracting a term formally doesn't change the result, there are infinitely many choices of term that produce this result. Why that one? It's entirely unmotivated; it clearly works, but there's no obvious way you could have plucked that particular term out of thin air yourself.

> The process I follow is more like I observe that for general k:

Your derivation is awesome! Rather than deducing forward from the raw materials (the given quadratic), you deduce backward from the goal. This lets you leverage known information to pick values that get you visibly closer to the starting point, term by term.

In the classic case, the goal here is to "complete the square", which is still of the unmotivated "cut" flavor -- it's not clear to the unskilled eye why that ought to be helpful.

I don't think the article's approach is any better motivated in that respect; we still have to introduce the idea that all quadratics can be factored into two first-order terms. This is not a trivial theorem, and it assumes access to the entire complex field (otherwise it's simply untrue in general).

But I think both approaches are valuable, as reliant on some "unmotivated" magic as they are. They all lend some insight into what's going on. Minimizing those moments is definitely beneficial though.
Not just India, many developing countries didn't follow what European countries tried to enforce through Berne Convention. Thankfully they saw it wasn't on the best interest of economic and social development.

Brazil and other Latin American countries have many provisions protecting freedom for private use, teaching and research purposes.
First of all, I don't see how using unix epoch timestamps can be called "premature optimization", it's a pretty widely used and standardized way of saving timestamps.

Secondly, if you're in "SQLite Strict Land" and you don't have access to abstractions like "tell the database this is a date", then the best way of storing timestamps is unix epoch, I would be extremely surprised if databases don't already do this behind the scenes when abstracting away things like dates for the user.

Thirdly, what is the value of tracking "source timezone"? This is solving a non-existent problem: if you are getting the timestamp in unix epoch from the source, and you're storing it in unix epoch, the "source timezone" is already known: it's UTC just like all unix timestamps are.

Timezones is fundamentally a data presentation concern, and I strongly believe they should not be a part of the source data.

> You track in a different timezone and they store+visualise activities against some weird client-side profile setting, which causes morning runs to render at 11pm. Only adding timezone later on. They totally mess this up.

This is exactly the type of issue that happens because you involve timezones in your source data. If all applications and databases only concern themselves with unix timestamps, and the conversion to a specific timezone only happens in the application layer upon display, this type of issue simply does not happen, because time "1638097466" when I'm writing this is the exact same time everywhere on the globe.

(Of course, similar issues can happen due to user error if two applications have different time zone settings and the user mistakenly enter a timestamp in the wrong TZ, but that's definitely not solved by making time zones a part of the data itself)
I just reread Dune and this… this is very good.
The last section on coupling reminded me of the concept of connascence[1] which I've found really helpful when talking about code.

[1] https://connascence.io
Anything close to £100k for a hands-on employee position was almost unheard of in the UK a decade ago, even adjusting for inflation. You might have found that much working in a particularly well paid field, which mostly meant finance in those days, for a big firm in London. For most of the industry the salary probably capped out at around £60k in today's money or maybe a bit more in London, but you could hit that ceiling and get a senior title in maybe five years if you were OK at your job. If you were lucky you might also have landed a nice bonus from a profit-sharing scheme or some stock options that came good.

A formal technical career path stretching well beyond senior level, six-digit developer salaries and the kind of additional compensation in bonuses and stock that we see today are all much more recent shifts in the market. We seem to be tracking a few years behind similar developments in the US as the big money and demand for more capable developers find their way over here.

You can definitely still make more going independent than most will as an employee if you have the ability and inclination but the market has been seriously distorted by the IR35 changes recently (or more accurately, by many clients who don't understand those changes and reacted negatively at the same time) so beware of that if you are thinking of a big career shift.

Everyone I know in the UK who made Serious Money(TM) by developing software made it from an exit when they were a founder or early employee.
They are in company, not good company.
> I do read books, and, if visualizers were real, I'd expect that my enjoyment of books would be naturally greater.

What? This must be satire

> The narrative format of a book is similar to how I think and perceive of reality - as words.

What else could a book be but words?

> Books are more like a native format for thoughts and experiences than I'd expect them to be for visual minds.

You’ve read every book? And you claim to know what happens in my mind when I read?

Also — have you ever noticed that literature often uses a lot of similes? You’ve never wondered what that’s about?
Many new scam possibilities are specific to cryptocurrencies.
Yeah, I think that's right. The hypothesis was that on average, one in a million cards is a hit. That implies that if you scratch a million cards, you have a 50:50 chance of a hit.

That the author got this basic thing wrong doesn't inspire much confidence in the rest of his reasoning.
No that was me. Gah, megakilowatthours. :-(
The argument "this doesn't matter because all SQLite databases are small anyway" does not hold water. There are many large SQLite databases out there. And even if there wasn't, storing timestamps as text is simply and fundamentally A Bad Idea(tm).
Thermoelectric crystal conductivity reaches a new high
Love it when someone harshly criticises an article but can't be bothered reading it.
I don't agree with the motion that there should be free alternatives. Probably 99% contracts that require this level of scrutiny are for-profit so it makes sense to ask for money in exchange of this service.
I would be _very_ vary of a free service that takes my contract info that often includes legal names, addresses, SSN, tax info, bank details, etc.
Similar to Big Clive.
Of course, if one thinks that work is the be all , end all to life then they'd find themselves rooting for endless lockdowns.

But there is more to life than work, people want to be able to go to a stadium, a club, to fly to Vegas or Macao to get shitfaced and play poker against the pros, they want to be able to go to resturants without having to wait half n hour for the vaccination check, want to be able to fly to Dubai or the Seychelles or Maldives or Aruba for the winter

Matter or fact the vast majority of people who consider themselves work-a-holic they are such because in their minds they know that they always have the option to unwind and do all the above things if needed be.

Remove that option and all of a sudden their mental health goes down drammatically
This is supposed to be plain English?
So if I understand correctly, copy-on-write is implemented using hard links, but the existence of hard links alone doesn't constitute CoW.
I agree, that made me laugh :)
Not if you have aphantasia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277
Same general idea, yeah. What they patented is their enterprise-oriented implementation of it.
Magnus Inc.: The Business of Being World Chess Champion
It depends on the context I think - big or small company, personalities at the top, internal politics…

In the planning there definitely does need to be someone with the technical understanding on both sides giving input though. An architect or CIO or something.
Yeah, true. I do 64 on default, except the service doesn't allow it, then I'll do the max allowed characters.
The copyright -- as long as it serves the author, not to be stolen by the publisher -- is the only source of income to authors outside of the academic world. So, that part has to be preserved. And generally, authors should have a say about the use of their work. Only misuse of the copyright (actually a forceful possession) should be restricted.
> Your first statement applies to anything and everything though. If I make any decision that my junior devs aren't comfortable with, I should either do the work for them or train them up.

You train them up. You don’t do the work for them nor do you intentionally cripple your application to avoid your responsibility of training them up.

A healthy organisation will have feature branches, pull requests with peer reviews. You’ll have unit tests, and CI/CD to enforce those tests. You’ll have code coverage analysis too. This is all pretty standard stuff these days so there’s no excuse in wussing out from supporting your junior engineers.

> What programming languages abstract away all the as many details of the RDBMS as something like sqlalchemy? Sqlite and postgres do enough things just slightly differently that I'd have to take slightly different code paths to support both. At the very least they'd both require different drivers.

You don’t initiate the drivers inside your SQL queries. In fact Perl has had tools to abstract that away for 2 decades! PHP, Java and Go abstract away the driver initiation too. In fact of the dozen or so different backend languages I’ve used over the years, I can’t think of any where you couldn’t go that. More over it is the correct way to architect one’s code. This is basic stuff, web 101.

Yeah some SQL syntax might differ from one RDBMS to another. If that’s the case then your dev environment should mirror the production environment (frankly that should be the case anyway otherwise you’d end up back in the “it works on my machine” arguments of the last decade; back before we learned how to do this shit correctly).

> In almost all instances where someone suggests that what is really needed is better software development practices, they're going to be outperformed by better tooling and people using the easier route for the most people.

But you’re doing the exact opposite of that by not using git feature branches, CI/CD, abstracting away your DB connection (which leads me to wonder if you’re even using connection pooling), unit tests, consistent development environments and all the other advancements of the last 20 years.

This isn’t a hypothetical argument either. I’ve been in the industry for decades, have worked on workflows like you’ve described as well as ones like I have. When I’ve worked in shops like you describe and the quality of the output was embarrassing. I’ve also managed places where I’ve then introduced the aforementioned and the number of bugs in production plummeted, the amount of QA time needed dropped, the number of times we’ve had to rollback a release have dropped to zero, the junior developers are now snake to work across more projects (giving more room for more projects to happen) and the CEOs impression of the team has gone up significantly.
PoW produces something intangible. You're probably basing on an assumption that tangible products are more worthy or justifiable of resources consumed than intangibles.

If you work with software development - which you probably do - I'd suggest checking what you do for a living, how much energy it consumes and how much physical product it generates.
I was thinking deeply about the threat model in a PoS posed about coordinated pooling of resources to effectively mimic the size of a large institutional borrowers with high collateral, i.e. proof of work in the present economic system (US Dollars gathered by him by providing real world value).

The main reason proof of work works so effectively is that it deals in physics with the actual expenditure of electricity as the punishment system for failing to produce the correct desired outcome.

Abstracting this away again, we have reality itself to content with. Evolutionarily we have evolved in respect to the dominance hierarchy (https://youtu.be/rUiG5_GcMyY) Where effort itself is a necessary precursor to ascending the ranks and being fit to lead.

Not to get too metaphysical, but essentially it boils down to:

- Social Status is based on real world implications and not self derived from the perceived ranking itself, that is if it is to be most stable across time. Being labeled the boss is essentially useless long term unless you truthfully represent the ideal or most capable individual. (Michael Scott from the television series The Office is a funny example of this)

- PoS offers reliability for the system based on its election of stake amount in the system that favors inventors, early adopters, and pre ordained position holders where distribution was not derived from effort in the real world with non-reversible consequences (burning electricity)

- Instead the selection mechanism its own value structure which may or may not accurately assess competence for reliable trust in a domain where zero-trust is key to consensus.

- Outsourcing consensus to something mediated by the laws of physics is more stable across time, and is yet another abstraction upon competence taking it outside the realm of US Dollars for social proof, but also adding in the component of physical consequences towards the chain of proof.

I'm also thinking as I write this that it would be important to consider changes in the environment as useful to the selection pressures. Why purely basing it upon success (stake) at one point in time is non-useful as the rules of the game may change, or reputation lost or abused in a PoS system would not accurately reflect changes in the need for rotation of positions of voting authority.
Let's try to visualize (A little mind-game for GPT-4):

-Take a piece of A4 paper

-A real one in the 3D world, with grain and texture.

-The 1000 first digits of pi have been written on it in black Arial 12.

(How many lines are there ?).
(Read back the third line)
(Read back the fourth line from right to left)

-Wrap the paper page into a cylinder so that the first digit of the line of the over-wrap match with the first digit of Pi by transparency.

-After the over-wrap, let the page go straight and not in a cylinder such that the wrapped paper look like a manuscript o.

-Now take a red laser, and shine it through the the paper such that you highlight the same number through the 3 folds of paper.
(What is the highlighted digit ?)

-Color this digit green for all instances on the page.
Unwrap the page, (on what line is there the most green numbers).

-Change the font size to 20 and do the same exercise, but color the number blue while still keeping the previous colors.

-Change the font size to 32 and do the same exercise, but color the number red while still keeping the previous colors.

-The password is the first four consecutive red-green-blue-black, what is the password ?
What are Adjuvants? – The use of Adjuvants in Vaccines
My Startup Life on Substack
check it out. wild stories will come out. I will tell it as it was and promise its good. Besides its free and will take 2 minutes of skimming.
The research a decade ago around face visualisation and recognition was indicating that the neural pathways and areas surrounding the ability differed from the pathways used for visualising/recognising non-facial objects. I don't know where the research stands today - I haven't kept up for it.

I remember being utterly astonished when I learned that other people had a seemingly magical ability to instantly recognise people - especially over time - which I lacked. Discovering I had developmental prosopagnosia was both a revelation and a relief!
I think what you meant to say was that Marc Andreeson understood it would become the platform, and Gates came to realize that he was on to something, and used Microsoft's monopoly to steal the implementation of the idea.
If it looks ugly, or you have to navigate too much (long files or a lot of external dependencies/dependency chains)... it's complex.

That's all you need to know really
Please consider a less cool but more neutral domain/TLD.
They under estimate trolls. "ZFS is over-hyped; FAT-32 is the best filesystem"[1]

[1] https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme
The working class gets washing machines where Royalty had (indeed, still has) a staff to wash and change all the bed sheets every morning.

You can measure progress much more honestly by measuring the reduction in staff size for royal households. If it is ever reduced to 0, then perhaps working class can aspire to similar lifestyle.
> Plus if he picks the lock in 30 seconds you may not pay such a high fee.

A story I was told once by an electrician who worked at a steel works for years.

The story goes something like this:

One day he was called out to a big engineering workshop, all their fancy new equipment is on the blink.

He walks up to one of the machines, has a look, then without saying anything promptly turns around and walks outside, followed by the curious manager.

The electrician circles the building and turns on the first tap he sees, and lets the water flow for a few minutes spilling on the ground. After leaving that go for a while, he turns the tap off again, and walks back in and tells the machine operators to try again. Magically, they all start working again.

The electrician has been there for barely a few minutes and hasn't even touched the machine or anything else electrical.

The manager asks for an explanation, since the electrician didn't even touch anything electrical. By way of response, the electrician says "You had someone fix that tap outside that was leaking, didn't you?" the manager replies in the affirmative. The electrician then explains that the leaking tap was keeping the building grounded - the slow leak was just enough to keep the sandy soils moist enough for a proper earth connection.

The electrician hands over the bill, with the emergency callout fee and minimum hours, etc.
The manager protests that surely just turning on a tap didn't warrant a fee that large.

The electrician replies that turning the tap on was free, knowing to turn the tap on was what they were paying for.

Whether that story is true or not, there's plenty of similar ones.

The point is that while you might get annoyed that an expert came in and solved the problem quickly, without that expert you were going to wait a lot longer or spend a lot more trying to fix it some other way.

Personally, I'd rather deal with a locksmith that gave me the option:
We can drill the lock, you can pay (say) $300 for new locks and keys and it'll take 30 minutes.
Or, you can pay $300, we'll pick it in a minute, you keep your existing keys.

The locksmith I called a few years ago used a long piece of wire with a string attached, slid it under the door to pull down the door handle from the inside.
There's a number of these industries that seem to have a lottery-like element to them, where getting a ticket to the big time requires a bunch of things to come together.

Fine-dining restaurants also "need" a chef with a name, a sensible location (though you can do OK many places), and some favorable early reviews.

Hedge funds, my industry, is similar, though the real estate issue is not quite so pressing as for a theater.

Starting your own band is also one of those where there's a big time where there are certain industry standards that you'll have to get familiar with while you work on the actual product.

Common to them all is you have to bring together a certain mix of human capital, experience, and novelty to get the right doors to open. There's always kind of structure that everyone in the industry understands, with its own lingo and skills and important players that everyone knows.

What they also have in common is that you can have very competent people who know how to do stuff that don't strike the gold. Everyone's heard music from highly accomplished musicians who aren't famous.
I too find his explanation on each click soothing.

Except when he got challenged to open a “difficult” bike lock in under 2 minutes by another locksmith he was dead silent the entire time and opened it in like 20 seconds.
X-COPY ;)
> Why are you wary of using something like that?

I don't know how to evaluate the risk, basically. Medical stuff tends to have a lot of noise.
You can also have hard links on non CoW filesystems (eg ext3). I assume hard links exists on most filesystems
Ok so how do I give this a try?
"Got a click out of him/hem"
No, but like in every other programming language you can implement something like that yourself either by 1) nesting arrays (columns) within an array (rows) and access items them by map[x][y] or by using a single array and transform x and y into an index like y*width+x.

I always take the second approach and wrap it in a class [1].

[1] https://github.com/ZuBsPaCe/godot-base-code/blob/main/Script...
> 5+ million people have died from COVID.

This is a shit metric, deliberately designed to mislead. The real metric that matters is years of life lost (YLL).
The Scatter-Gather Process
Immunologic Adjuvant
Lessons from a year of AI research
Even outside of this genre, I found some titles I couldn't on libgen at times, which made me very confused about the system is structured.
We do datahoard, yes.
I think you are right, if you find a similar person with similar voice (even commission them 5$ in fiverr) and only deep-fake the face in a low quality video, this is very much achievable in today's state of the art.
Now we're talking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfJjicQkYsU
https://archive.md/FGOxb
How to Get Payouts for Ethereum Mining Without Fees
I feel a bit “we value processes over people” on this one. Not disagreeing with a lot that’s said but it just feels a bit prescriptive and I think agile (as in manifesto rather than big consultancy) is very much context specific
Didn't really expect to see this from the Guardian - but at least it's nice that it's not stuffed full of affiliate links, as far as I could see almost all of them just link to the product page on the manufacturers websites.
It’s… markdown. It’s portable. It’s as portable as you can get.