skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Posts like these are really helpful, thanks! Especially since, in my opinion, at least, a lot of the new English nonfiction books that come out nowadays are 90% fluff and 10% actual material. Many of them seem to be filled with anecdotes that often ramble on and on, making them a chore to read. Basically, 30 pages worth of material turned into a 300 page book. And worse, ALL of them are "best-sellers" with raving reviews from supposedly big media outlets adorning their back pages...

Even worse, a lot of them cannot be trusted... Atleast in Japan, I've seen many books on the bookshelves of big bookstores with clickbaity titles like "The Real Effects of the COVID-19 vaccine! Will you be safe after 2 years!?" written by "reputed doctors" who have a dubious history of peddling weird things.

I have, in principle, stopped buying and reading these nonfiction books unless and until they were written atleast 30 years ago, either written by people on the level of Richard Feynmann in their field, or have a reputable track record and enough (preferably decades) experience about the topic they're writing. This filters out 99.99% of the books flooding the market today. I still run into weird things though.
People need to be taught to read code and not only write it. I feel like a lot of problems start with people seeing more than 100 lines then saying "fuck it" then start clamoring to remove technical debt by adopting something new or even an writing an entire new code base.

Reading code is fun and it's a skill that took me time to develop. People need to told that's a skill you need and yes (shock) not emphasize creativity as much as we do. Creativity is great but it has enough encouragement in society already. We need people willing to read what already exists as well.
It is in the constitution, aka 2nd. Founding fathers already given us the permission to do so and expected sometime down the line, American government will go rogue. If the courts are expected to be scared or corrupted with no standing, Americans have been instructed by our founding fathers to take up arms to rectify domestic enemies. Other countries like Brits and China have no such permissions inscribe in their constitutions hence they are expected to be subservient to their governments whims (e.g. HK).
Yup. In general - handle the dependencies after you've done The Thing instead of before doing it the next time.

It's easy to do Y and Z after you already got up and did X. It's much harder to persuade yourself to do Y so that you can do Z so that you can do X when you're lying in bed fighting to get out 15 minutes earlier.
For those (like me) who haven't heard of the scientist at the heart of the offending article, have a read of https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardi...

This goes into some of the original accusations of racism he received in the 70s and the background behind them.

Quote:

They accused Wilson of sending human nature back to the concentration camps. Wilson isn’t a determinist who believes that life is purely mechanistic, and he isn’t right-wing - he remains a Democrat and fears the environmental worst from the George Bush presidency. Although Wilson argued that homosexuality might have a genetic element, he also argued that it was therefore natural and should be tolerated. But Gould was good-humoured and discursive, taking an apparently compassionate view of human nature, and Lewontin, a population geneticist who could show that racial differences are genetically tiny, added credence to charges of racism, even though Wilson hadn’t brought the subject up.

Did he think that his opponents were themselves guilty of prejudice? “They were, although they never admitted it,” Wilson says slowly, reaching for the words. “I came from the Old South, I was raised as a racist. I mean, we all were. It was only in my teens that I began to change. But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”
Is that why the unvaccinated were purged from the armed services including the Marines? Surely the top military generals don’t need to forewarn a suspects coup in 2024 to solidify their own power in the process.
So, it's been a while since I've read the opinion section of Scientific American (for reasons that will shortly become obvious), so I'm going to ask the broader audience here this question:

Is it really that unusual (certainly not unprecedented) to come across a poor opinion piece in Scientific American?

If this was an indicator of the demise of SA, I should think it would have folded decades ago.
This is great news! Thanks for the link!
That's not contradictory. The earth may be greening but become inhospitable to our staple crops at the same time. The world could become a lush jungle, that wouldn't make it a good place to live for 8 billion humans.
Lianne Wadi
Do you also have to call a phone number and wait on hold for hours to cancel you subscription?
It is hard to give advice here, that would really work (the reality of a stranger is more complex than they could convey in a few paragraphs).

You could quite your job, find new energy and a new job and go ahead. But depending on the circumstances and your personality this might stress you out even more.

You could find something (hobby, career outlook, mission, ...) that gives you a goal you really want to work towards, but again I cannot tell whether your circumstances would allow you to do such a thing next to work.

What is clear however is that your work is draining you and you need to do something about it. Working less, talking to a superior (or writing them if that is easier), try to fix things with the collegues (e.g. by switching tasks), but maybe there is no hope for this job and quiting is the best way forward.

If you don't do sports already, I would start doing something. We IT people tend to burn a lot energy with our brain but often lack the body movement our body evolutionarily would expect. I am running soley for that purpose and it helps me to stay focused and with myself. Maybe give it (or cycling, swimming, ..) a try
People who are worried about racism. There seems to be a growing acceptance of racially-charged policies in institutions.

Even if we accept the occasionally-made argument that meritocracy is an illusion, explicitly racist policies seems like a step down from at least attempting to evaluate individual merit. Attempts at race blindness in the institutions are much better ideas than the ideologies that currently seem to be incubating.
Because it's not just cyclical major depression (and there's no "just" to major depression either, but that's another rant). The diagnostic criteria for bipolar is that you have had at least one extended episode of mania or hypomania alongside a depressive episode, so you're not going to have the diagnosis unless you've been manic or hypomanic at some point. Although it may not be a major or dominant part of someone's presentation, mania or hypomania is nevertheless there and it effects what treatments are appropriate. Certain SSRI's may trigger off hypomania or mania in a bipolar patient, or simply be utterly ineffective, whereas in someone with cyclical major depression their response would be different. I'm bipolar II and spend roughly 1/4 to 1/3rd of my life meeting the criteria for major depression but very rarely have hypomanic episodes, and this was the case even before I was on lithium. Indeed I've gone for years in between major hypomanic episodes. But hoo boy! When they hit there is no mistaking them.

The other thing is that unlike with depression where you have to squint really hard to see much of an effect from most treatments, there are reasonably effective treatments for mania and hypomania, including good old lithium. So if you're being treated, while you might still suffer from regular bouts of depression, you'll likely have much reduced or even eliminated hypomanic or manic symptoms. So it's not unusual to see manic depressives who are treated showing very few manic symptoms for years on end.
Almost all advice online about interviewing is written from the point of view of the candidate. Sometimes this is good advice, but sometimes it devolves into some kind of astrology, where candidate are just guessing how things work.

I've done +300 interviews at FAANG so I can share bit of advice from the interviewer's side. The caveat is that this is based on how I conduct interviews, so YMMV with other people.

* Always ask clarifying questions. Almost all problems have some level of ambiguity that you need to clarify. This is intended. The more senior you are, the more important this becomes.

* Explain your approach before you begin, and even while you code. This gives the interviewer a chance to help you if you are down the wrong path, or even just understand what you are up to.

* If you get stuck, ask for help! think of this as a pair programming session rather than an interview. I much prefer a candidate who gets stuck, ask for hints, gets unblocked and writes good code, rather than one that doesn't ask for help and writes not-so-good code.

* Caveat: There is a tension with asking questions. There is such a thing as too much help, e.g. I need to explicitly tell you how to solve the problem. Use judiciously.

* Take interviewer's hints. The interviewer has probably asked this question dozens of times and knows it inside out. If they give you a hint, 99% of times they are on to something.

* Personally I don't like "hard LC" problems. Instead I prefer medium difficulty problems, and spend extra time probing the candidate's coding skills. This includes:

1. Write tests.

2. Handle corner cases/incorrect inputs.

3. Discuss how to scale the code.

4. Discuss how to refactor the code.

* If nothing else, write the simplest brute force solution you can think of. As an interviewer I need a coding sample to evaluate the candidate. Trying to and failing to implement an optimal solution is worse than implementing a correct brute force one.
Unity builds, but also unified and jumbo builds.
Best Paper Awards in Computer Science over the past 25 years
I though it was already clear that we were talking human scale. And you still talk about 4,500 million years as non-renewable, but 15 million years (plus 100% magic ocean harvesting) as renewable. At no point anybody said "infinitely renewable", and you arguing it makes that a strawman argument.

Renewable is defined, like it or not, as a source that replenishes in a finite human scale (roughly, 50-100 years). Sun, waves, hydraulics and wind "replenish" everyday. Wood takes about 30 years. If you find yourself saying things like "15 millions years" or "60,000" years, it's not renewable.
That's great. I'll be watching you. Can we request topics? Cheers mate
The biggest obstacle that I see is the fact that there is no single provider/company that offers all of the services that Google has.

Would you replace Google with MS or Apple? Those two are the only ones that have the whole set of services that can be compared to Google.

It is easy to find replacement for each of them, but integration... That is a whole another story. There is a bunch of different password managers, cloud storage providers, search services. Based on the reasons why you want to ditch Google you can choose the providers that you like, e.g. for mail you could go to Proton or GMX, search Duck Duck Go,...
"Zotfile allows automatic renaming of attachments, which includes moving the PDF file to a different folder. This means my zotero account still has plenty of free storage, while the space-consuming PDFs are stored in my university's effectively limitless cloud drive."

Wow, did not know that. Have to test this! Thank you!
I’ve managed to cut news out of my life entirely. Nothing really changed, except the extra free time.

Hacker news is not really any different, it is just easier to justify as “I might find something useful here”.

But all I achieved here is fav & forget smart sounding articles, and point whored at the comment section for easy dopamine.

It’s a trap.
> Isn't that contradicting yourself? I'm pretty sure open() can block.

No, blocking compute would be you doing something for a long period of time.

"open/close can block" means very little. You only need a mitigation if it ends up blocking long enough to be a problem in reasonable setups.

You do that have to care about what happens if someone runs the code on an intentionally terrible/horribly slow but technically in spec toy filesystem. No need to prematurely optimize for this scenario.

And especially with devfs you cannot just listen to POSIX and must know what the kernel is providing you - knowing how long operations take on such fds is normal design input.
I have a firmware project written in C that I maintain. Probably 200k lines of code. I feel like I'm constantly fretting how to keep the headers and dependencies from becoming a hot mess. At the same time not exploding the number of headers either.
Hot Takes on Code Freezes
It is like Newton’s second law or something: anything deeply loved must be hated by an equal number of people with equal intensity. Otherwise there will not be balance in the force… or something.
Exactly. Me too. Which is why I’m sure we shouldn’t allow it.
I tend to lean left, but after reading the article I have to say it is very biased. For me as an outside observer it looks like both the left and the right political factions have become so polarized they are constantly aiming to “take control” to prevent the “other side” from having a say, because they believe the others are destroying America. The notion that politics is about consensus-building is long gone.

I do agree with the article that 2024 could be an inflection point where the U.S. fundamentally moves away from democracy, but it is not a given that this happens under a Trump presidency, because it seems also possible that a second Biden presidency declares martial law to control millions of angry and armed Trump supporters.
FTA: “The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres (0.005 millimetre), which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell”
> the editorial section is about 3% of the magazine

While you have a good point, it says a lot about SciAm that they ran such a piece:

- that was so shamefully anti-intellectual

- so soon after Wilson's death

- with a special mention about it as "insightful" from the editor on her Twitter account

It's a sloppy hit piece for no good reason. Monica McLemore and Laura Helmuth deserve considerable shame.
The VCs control your board. If you don't spend the money the way they want, they can and will replace you. They might even find a creative way to dilute your stock to $0. Lots of stories like that.

Taking VC is like making a deal with the devil.
One thing I have found that helps is "not finding my phone attractive". Weird phrasing, pardon my English.

Basically, I have a midrange phone that cannot play the latest games at 60fps, and has a crack on its tempered glass running through the middle. This functionality and appearance makes it much less appealing than say, a Kindle with no scratches to spend time on.

Due to this, I basically forget my phone is next to me on my bed, and it only serves to take calls if needed in the middle of the night and wake me up next morning with the alarm.

Good luck!
This is just my opinion, no professional advice!

Quitting was the best I could do for myself. I feel like if I just quit earlier it wouldn't have messed me up even more.

If you can afford a break, do it. Breaks, relaxing, coming down and reconnecting are the most valueable things you can do to your mind.

My burnout really messed me up, I may will never fully fit into work culture again. But you know what? Life had their own plans anyway and I can't complain where I am today.
But if you want to "nudge" an otherwise near miss asteroid you gotta wait till however long till it comes around, which can be 1000+ years?

From https://www.britannica.com/science/Earth-impact-hazard/Frequ...:

> Because there are far fewer large NEOs and long-period comets in space than smaller ones, the chances of a collision decrease rapidly with increasing size. The impact-hazard community—primarily scientists with an interest in the issue—has defined a global catastrophe to be an impact that leads to the death of one-fourth or more of the world’s population. An impact by a 1-km- (0.6-mile-) diameter NEO, the smallest believed capable of causing such a catastrophe, is estimated to occur about once per 100,000 years on average, based on the assumed population in space of such objects. On the other hand, an impact by a 100-metre (328-foot) NEO, the smallest believed capable of causing regional devastation, is estimated to occur about once every 1,000 years on average.
I don't think you can have a "sliding window" of time just based on that.

The next time you call the function, you need to count how many of the old calls are still "unexpired". This number (potentially) gets lower with each passing quantum of time.

How can you do that without holding a timestamp for each call? Please clarify if I misunderstood you.
No, no. You did not mislead. Somehow I mixed up and actually wanted to comment on another comment. Sorry for the confusion.
Cool article, virtual worlds have a way of spontaneously create very interesting enviroments like housing markets an currencies. But I don't agree with much of it, the scarcity isn't (necessarily) artificial. If you don't have an empty space with arbitrary points of entry proximity to game objects determines scarcity (much like in real space, space isn' scarce, location is).

If it's a problem for that specific game the specific devs can think of mechanisms to fix it in a way that make sense for that context. I also don't see speculation as some evil for some unknown reason.
That's a better solution in general IMO, but the author's approach can guarantee that you'll never go over N calls in a sliding window rather than fixed windows. I don't believe that's possible with the timestamp + count solution. Gotta bring up both solutions and ask the interviewer what they want :)
So that whole Twitter rant seems to be about how Twitter, a private company, decided to not actively publish provably false conspiracy theories and hate mongering? And that's fascist somehow?

You do realize that that implies that it would be less fascist if the government could force a private company to publish falsehoods and propaganda, right?
I did not claim this is the case in general, but the phases the vaccine trials were conducted more parallel than usually would be the case. See Nature.com:

> The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1
"The pandemic has ushered in a new era of wastewater analysis, once a maligned discipline, to inform public health policy."

Really? Why was it once a "maligned discipline" ?
wow that's a pretty amazing web design for such a technical topic
I read big portions of Sociobiology while taking a lot of evolutionary biology coursework in college. As stated in the guest post, the book primarily focuses on non-human animals so it's bizarre to me that McLemore is trying to make this about racism in humans without any quotes or anything to tie him to that. It's just an astoundingly poorly written article that SA shouldn't have published for that reason alone.

But I suspect they're employing the same strategy that The Washington Post and others use - post intentionally inflammatory guest op-eds and profit from the influx of clicks.
Shouldn't be too surprising that one of the core devs at the heart of modern computing infra has a Threadripper...
>The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code. An increase of .35%

This is horribly misleading; most of these lines of code are drivers, which this patchset doesn't even concern.

It's still a massive change that only a handful of developers will ever be able to review in entirety - a fact to which the size of the project is completely irrelevant - if anything, actually, it urges even more caution, given the implied complexity. Which I believe was (at least in part) parent comment's point - given the importance and ubiquity of the Linux kernel, this may be concerning.

That said, I am very confident in the structures put in place by the kernel devs, their competence and the necessity for such a change - but trivializing a 100k LoC patchset because the project it's intended to land in is even more colossally complex isn't how I'd choose my approach.
A rewrite directive is just writing code.
The other real problem with cheap bad bikes is quality control matters on a device that (here in Europe) you might effectively be trusting your life to. As a poor student I had a BSO a year for three years, until I could afford a better object. The first died in traffic when the derailleur came out of the frame, leaving a burred hole behind, and a bus honking at me as it just managed to avoid squishing me. The second died when the pedals sheered off the crankshaft when I pushed down hard going up a hill. The third one died when I went over a large pot-hole in the cycle lane, bending the forks in the process. Absolutely none of these things should be able to happen. That they did is, of course, testament to the false economy (and great danger) of BSOs. In the States I understand that they're likely to be viewed as toys, but in Western Europe they're overwhelmingly likely to be used as transportation by those with little money, in busy, city centre traffic. There's a reason Dutch bikes have a reputation for quality, weigh a ton, last forever, and we surprisingly expensive.
Because it’s not the test rate difference that’s important for wider society but the hospitalization rate.

I think you’re arguing that VAERD cannot be ruled out. ADE has been known among this family of viruses for long-enough that it’s described in the process of designing vaccine concentration. Though, I’m certainly not educated enough to understand ADE let alone VAED/VAERD.
I guess if we had a way to vaccinate all those mice, either through injection or getting them to eat something we'd rather use it to just kill them.
I saw only this quote on Twitter the other day

> The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

Which was, frankly, shocking to see coming from Scientific American, something I had assumed was a respectable scholarly publication, if not an actual academic journal, per se. It's an absolutely mind-boggling mistake to publish in something that claims itself to be about science. That is not at all what a normal distribution is, and the normal distribution makes no such assumption. Anyone who passed a basic Intro to Statistics course should be able to explain why this is wrong.

To open with such a profoundly wrong assertion, and then publish an article built on this flawed assumption just beggars belief. I feel like I've wandered into some kind of Twilight Zone that there are apparently serious people, charged with informing the public about science, who are publishing obvious falsehoods and expecting us to go along with them.

I cannot understand how an editor of a scientific publication read that sentence and did not immediately send the piece back to the author with a note reading "No thank you. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about".
Hmm..I didn't find it eloquent or better in any way than Scott's post. The only difference is quotations of the original article followed by "No, that's wrong" or "Are you serious!?".
Maker of Rapid Covid Tests Told Factory to Destroy Inventory