skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But all the best programmers are good at maths.

Did that study do anything beyond intro programming materials? Did that study really show anything?
There are only so many hours in a day. If we spend all of them thoroughly debunking known quacks nothing else will ever get done.

Stephen Wolfram hasn’t yet achieved full quack status where it’s best to dismiss him out of hand, but he has been moving in that direction for some time.
Not having to submit and coordinate PRs across a dozen repos is a pretty tangible benefit.

> unless you invest a ton of resources into proprietary tooling that requires a bunch of maintenance, since all the open source solutions are terrible at this and the whole data model is built around splitting out individual project repositories.

Agree that there's a bunch of tooling needed to operate a monorepo, but there's also a bunch of tooling to sanely manage dozens of "microrepos" as well (when an upstream library changes, update downstream libraries' dependency manifest files to take the new version, run tests, report errors back to upstream, etc). I don't know of any open source tools that manage this problem, but I'm guessing they aren't high-quality if only due to the complex nature of the problem space.

> And then after all that effort, why wouldn’t you just use tooling the way it was intended, and the way it’s used in the open source model, so you can partition your CI/CD without a bunch of hacks, and don’t run into bizarre scaling issues with your VCS.

Because the tooling sucks, as previously mentioned. Many changes require touching many repos, which means coordinating many pull requests and manually changing dependency manifest files and so on.

Ultimately, the "repo" concept is limiting. We need tooling that is aware of dependencies one way or another, and sadly all such open source tooling sucks whether it assumes the relevant code lives in a single repo or across many repos.
I did the same around 2 years ago after 15+ years of Linux Desktop as primary OS but I had completely different experience and have not gone back to Linux and see little reason to do so.

> when you install a Linux distribution, it’ll start off either all KDE or all GTK,

Yes, you definitely start off with that... and you may even be able to maintain that with GTK to some extent... but if you want to use KDE, you will most definitely end up with a few GTK apps which will look out of place. And don't even get me started with other DEs.

Windows, with all the 10 vs 11 and old style vs new style apps, feels much more coherent.

> You can’t customize anything

You don't need to because things actually work.

> I am a software & web developer - and Linux is a toolbox, full of highly polished tools, crafted over decades by software developers, for software developers.

Huh? I do all my development on Windows + WSL2 and run all my software on Linux servers. There is exactly ZERO tools I miss.

> Non-composable Software

Absolute nonsense. Not only does PowerShell is extremely powerful, you can also pipe output from a PowerShell command to a Linux command. The following shows an example of grepping through PowerShell history.

cat (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath | wsl grep "ssh .*ubuntu@"

> Environment Variables look like this: %PROFILE%, instead of this: $HOME; which is fine, just different; although PowerShell seems to accept either form, which is nice.

Unless you want to run legacy batch files, there is absolutely no reason to use legacy cmd.exe over PowerShell on a Windows terminal. Environment variables are accessed differently with $Env:VAR_NAME, which will take some getting used to, but it's fine.

> No Middle-Click Paste

There are 3rd party applications to do that and more.
> massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs which does not appear to be addressed at all?

If corporations buying houses was actually affecting the purchase market prices, then we'd see an equal effect on rental prices going down. A corporation can't live in a house, so they'd be renting it out. If these evvvill corporations were keeping houses vacant just to screw over regular hard working folks, resulting in no effect on the rental market prices, then we'd see it in the vacancy stats. But that's never actually mentioned by housing conspiracy theorists because the vacancy stats show that the areas with highest prices have extremely low vacancy rates, because demand for housing is so much higher than supply, because not enough housing has been built.
To be able to know who owns what (critically but not only in the media) should be the basis of every democracy.
Russia’s Ruble Roars Back
Getting banned from the game because of cheating will also be helpful.
On an absolute scale no. However my wife's salary tripled when moving back for the same position.

I moved from Knoxville, TN which is experiencing a large housing crunch due to lots of speculative real estate investments. I've moved to a comparable sized city that is not the Bay area.
> I'm not coming in, ever.

In my experience working remote for the past decade "remote" usually involves coming to the office or having an offsite once a quarter. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
I feel like if you put 2000 hours into anything you'll be able to get into flow states with it. Seems like a "right brain" feeling-reaction loop than a "left brain" thinking-evaluating loop.

Find a skill you want to build and track the hours you spend doing it. If you don't think you'll get there after 500, try something else.
I’m sure there are talented recruiters but generally I’m lucky if they connect any dots properly. Things like: “I see you have years of experience on X, here’s an opening in Y”, or “I found your resume <that clearly states objectives, including where I would work>, here’s a job in $faraway_city!”.

In other words, they barely seem to read resumes or anything else so if they totally screw up key details of the position, that is probably par for the course.

(Insert rant about losing StackOverflow Developer Stories, which actually allowed explicit tagging of things like preferred tech which made matching really easy.)
The Romans knew about and documented the risks of asbestos, so don't be so sure.

They also knew about some of the risks of lead. Vitruvius (during Augustus) wrote that water through clay pipes is better and purer, and others comment about how the care you need to take when preparing food in leaden vessels.

e.g. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...
On Aaron Matz’s “The Novel and the Problem of New Life”
We are shipping a fix for this right now! Really glad you noted this. Will let you know when it's out.
I would say you can't play that game anymore. You were obviously getting something out of that game, so you need to find a replacement for that, that is less addicting. You said you like the flow state it gives you so you could focus that energy on something else, a side project, wood working, chess,read a book, or even another video game.

I wouldn't call relaxing a "waste of time", but too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. The amount of physiological warfare waged against our attention span in this age is not something humans are built for, so cut yourself some slack.
Which game, by the way?

A friend of mine managed to quit by selling his PC computer. He found that being unable to play was the only way to be sure, and that it's easier to sell a PC than it is to not install the game or not play.

Not sure if this is good advice or not.
I've been seeing age checks like this more and more.

Recently the FTC came down hard[0] on Kurbo (aka Weight Watchers) for not doing enough/anything to stop children under 13 (COPPA) from making accounts. Since they're not confident there's no children with accounts, now all Kurbo's data is tainted and they have to delete all user data and destroy any "algorithms" derived from that data.

Historically Dropbox probably never asked for a user's age so they might worry they could run into this problem in the future. The threat of all a company's data being tainted is a huge one, so of course they're now overreacting a bit.

p.s. hopefully you can get your account fixed, but if not, you could use the amazing rclone[1] tool to copy your files off. (it's rsync for cloud storage). Or you could just put them in a folder shared with another DBX account.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...

[1] https://rclone.org/
Nah, it’s the animal sprits
The cliche responses, but.. Sports offer similar flow states,. but do require some effort to get to that point. Additional bonus is you get fit and meet people as well . Personally I surf, run, bike, but other good ones are rock climbing, martial arts, cross fit .. it's never too late to start (but injuries do start accumulating on some of the more intensive ones after 40)
Well investment companies buy to resell. If there is a glut of new houses prices will definitely go down in the medium term.
The non-offensive way would be not to lie.
People love to not include property tax when pushing these narratives.

Texas has a higher total tax burden for poor and middle class than California, and a lot of that is hidden in the property tax
Many companies are struggling with is issue. I wouldn't be surprised if the policy evolved from when the recruiter got the assignment.

Disruptive change is hard. In the business units that I manage, some units thrived under COVID and get better working remote. Others collapsed and remain barely functional. It requires alot capital and ROI to justify dealing with it. It's one of the infuriating aspects for working for giant companies.
If the WHO and CDC are just going to listen to whatever Russia says and not look into things for themselves to confirm then they are incompetent and shouldn't exist.

Also, you seem to forgetting the WHO's interesting relationship with China. You seem so anti Russia you are missing the country who actually manipulated the WHO.
The Romans asked the same question.
Good Relationships Are the Most Consistent Predictor of a Happy Life (2019)
Do this in the US too, please. Also farmland.
A Good Investor Can Help You Close Candidates. A Great Investor Will Sometimes
This is either an extremely obvious and boring observation or the basis for a metaphysical trip, depending on how pre-disposed you are to "mathematical spiritualism" :)
It could be that those ads created some sort of brand awareness and that the downside might not be realized for quite some time. I'm not saying that that is the case here, but it could be another interesting thing to investigate, although it wouldn't really be easy to objectively measure.
They will correct errors, after you give them a bunch of document scans or a credit card. I wasn't willing to provide that to a random foreign company for a free service, I just moved to Discord.
I had the EXACT experience with both adwords and facebook budgets. I kept remarketing on but cut the other campaigns and our growth rates didn't change, and our CAC dropped like a rock. The key word rates in our industry are ridiculous because we have overfunded competitors throwing away money trying to funnel customers into higher margin products. We were literally throwing money away competing for keywords with companies that have different cost structures.
The Witness is probably one of the most polarizing games made. It's my favorite single player game of all time, with The Outer Wilds in #2. However... No one I've shown it to in real life likes it, and internet comments, as here, are perpetually mixed.
That‘s very drastic. I‘m a rather extroverted head of engineering and would fight tooth and nails to keep remote for my teams.
I could sell my house (not in Canada) for so much more than I bought it two years ago. But then what? All of the houses around here are going to corporations who are squeezing money out of those who can't find a home to buy. Because they've all been bought up by corporations. I'm not "anti-corporate" by any stretch of the imagination, but this is definitely a problem that is hurting families. I would vote for something similar here.
I guess, I have never before been asked to meet any vaccine requirement in my professional career, and all health and safety requirements are typically listed up front, including steel toed shoes and lifting up to 50lbs, I don't know why I would have to ask an endless list of requirements.
> And if we look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is composed of, nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct impact in the long term than any other man-made energy production efforts so far.

Citation is very much needed. Comparing nuclear energy with the dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my mind. Nuclear energy isn't perfect, but it's a lot more contained than fossil fuels.
> Which should’ve helped a whole bunch of hard-working regular people to buy their first-time homes, but that is not what is happening it seems?

This is false if you think about it.

What drives the price of a house is what people can pay on their monthly payments.

As rates go down prices go up as people can afford to pay more.

Unfortunately for home buyers this means the downpayment goes up. What you end up with is a bunch of first time home buyers who can in theory afford the mortgage payments but can't build up the $200,000 nest egg required as a 20% downpayment on a $1,000,000 home.

When rates go back up home prices will drop and so will the size of the downpayment required, even though the person will pay about the same monthly on their mortgage.

Lower rate help those with existing homes and therefor existing equity more than those without homes.
Here's a nice detailed research paper on the problems with microplastics:

> "Today, it is an issue of increasing scientific concern because these microparticles due to their small size are easily accessible to a wide range of aquatic organisms and ultimately transferred along food web. The chronic biological effects in marine organisms results due to accumulation of microplastics in their cells and tissues. The potential hazardous effects on humans by alternate ingestion of microparticles can cause alteration in chromosomes which lead to infertility, obesity, and cancer. (2018)"

You can get it at sci-hub_se just enter this title in the search box: "Microplastic pollution, a threat to marine ecosystem and human health: a short review"

For a broader discussion on the continuing issue of environmental toxins accumulating in human beings, more pop-sci:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/chemicals...

> "Yet even though many health statistics have been improving over the past few decades, a few illnesses are rising mysteriously. From the early 1980s through the late 1990s, autism increased tenfold; from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, one type of leukemia was up 62 percent, male birth defects doubled, and childhood brain cancer was up 40 percent. Some experts suspect a link to the man-made chemicals that pervade our food, water, and air. There's little firm evidence. But over the years, one chemical after another that was thought to be harmless turned out otherwise once the facts were in."

Note however that US academic institutions basically cut all research into these subjects due to political and industrial pressure. It started with Republican attacks on USGS funding for environmental pollution research in the early 1990s, and continued with NIH cutting funding for environmental carcinogen research in favor of inheritied genetic explanations for cancer. Hence, 'little firm evidence'.
Research suggests that happiness is most strongly correlated with having close personal relationships (aka family and friends, etc.).

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/relationships-happiness-wel...
Or, if a deadline is blown, the agency has to either approve the permit, or ask a judge for an extension based on actual need.
There are many likely reasons for the explosion in housing prices - but we can't pretend that immigration isn't one of them. A solution will likely need to be multi-factored, but reducing demand by reducing immigration will probably have to be part of that solution. To ignore that is to limit how effective your measures in reducing the cost of housing can be.
Moreover the first attempts to decipher hieroglyphs were in the 14th century, there was an enormous body of examples, and by 1798 they had been connected to Coptic (a language partially descended for the ancient Egyptian language) and there had been great strides in deciphering them.

A rosetta stone for the Indus script might not be enough.
Having tried to create a witness puzzle pack myself, I can assure you they chose quality over quantity. Trying to explain a new mechanic without making it either cryptic or patronizing is nigh impossible, and they did it 8+ times.
I think he started his company to sell Mathematica - the research agenda stuff has been more recently emphasized. When I first started using Mathematica almost 30 years ago the company was pretty much just selling the tool for technical computing. It was after his book came out around 20 years ago that things drifted more towards his weird research, which really amped up in the last decade.

The biggest complaint I’ve seen about his work, especially the new Wolfram Physics stuff is that it’s a theory without predictions. He pretty much exclusively talks about representing things we already know but in terms of his world of cellular automata and rewriting systems. Until it is applied to make a testable prediction, it’s not as much science as it is gratuitous programming, visualization, and grandiose claims.

It is impressive the sheer volume of self-congratulating text that he can produce. It’s quite hard to read since it spends nearly as much time talking about himself and how insightful he is as it does the technical topics. From the things I’ve read, there isn’t much of value buried in there.
That’s a ridiculous amount of regulation to enforce and frankly is very restrictive. Why shouldn’t people have two homes.
I can't handle those sorts of skill/ladder games. They demand too much time to keep up your skill and are clearly addicting. Personally I've found music to play a similar role in bringing that "flow state". Find a practical hobby where your time and effort result in something material rather than digital AND has the added benefit of being sharable with others.

I still enjoy videogames but I essentially only play:

- In person co-op games with friends (smash, mario kart, etc.)
- Challenging single player games (souls-like) where I set a timer somewhere between 30-60 minutes and force myself to stop at the end.
Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.

All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any particular area. In many places, the poorer round-trip efficiency of chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia, hydrocarbons) is offset by the massive usefulness of synthesizer output after the tanks are full. That is, when the tanks have been topped off, the excess output generates revenue.

Solar generating capacity has become so cheap that needing 2x, 3x, 4x more, for whatever reason, is no blocker.
> But in a traditional marriage

There isn't one concrete definition of marriage, traditionally.
It really does work great! And thanks for the suggestion -- I've added an RSS feed!
I have thought about this thing for some time and I think that the unifying idea of math, physics (quantum shit in particular), programming, type theory, probability etc is the idea of fixed points which is just ubiquitous. Fixed points are based on the idea of an adjoint (1-to-many relationship) and a norm (many-to-1 relationship).

I have written up something about this https://github.com/adamnemecek/adjoint

Jon Claerbout has website that explains the concept of adjointness https://reproducibility.org/RSF/book/bei/conj/paper_html/pap...
>unless your misdeeds achieve a Hans Reiser level of publicity.

Really. I know people with felony convictions for serious crimes who got back into the industry they offended against. It turns out that background check firms are only reliable when the applicant has no criminal background, heheh.
Game addiction is a multi-year struggle for me that comes and goes. At one point I even set limits for myself using Blizzard's excellent parental controls, but even then I found myself disabling them when I was convinced that I just deserved 'a little bit more' gaming to offset a hard day, and then would forget to re-enable them again. I recently deliberately locked myself out of my Steam account, by changing the password to a random string and giving that to my partner to keep safe. So far that's worked: I haven't just gone and found another non-Steam game to play. But we'll see how long it lasts.

I totally identify with what you say about being able to focus on the game to the exclusion of everything else. The world is difficult to cope with, and games are beautifully, seductively, easy.

Congratulations on your four months clean. I hope that you find something else in life that provides the same flow state, but without the addiction.
Explordle – A Simpler Version of Geoguessr
As someone who spent a decade at FB I can assure you that we had as few monorepos as possible. No more, no less.

The danger with mouthing off on HN is that this place is thick as thieves with people who actually do or did what the bloggers whinge on about.

Though in this case, the blogger has worked at all three of MS, Google, and Twitter, so I wouldn’t be quick to disregard him either.
This is now impossible to do on iOS devices.
There is some interesting material here, yet at a basic level this sounds like it is all steeped in the kind of misunderstanding of mathematics that is common among physicists.

In physics there are real tests and relations that have meaning so it makes sense to ask if String Theory is correct or useful. In mathematics there are complex structures built from axioms and sometimes these structures can be related to each other in interesting ways. Will anything important ever come of String Theory? Maybe, but from a mathematical point of view no theory needs to correctly model what is real or have demonstrated application to be worthy of exploration and study.

The particular thing that comes to mind repeatedly when reading this is the fact that more or less all of mathematics can be derived starting either from set theory or from logic theory. There is no particular reason to choose one or the other, but set theory is the most common foundational substrate. Depending on how this is done it may be more simple, easy, or direct to express or make proofs regarding some particular idea or domain. But Wolfram seems to be seeing things in terms of there being a big space with defined paths through it. Instead of leaning on set theory or logic theory to get to a particular expression or result there should be a global basis for expressions and results. That different models can be used for the same phenomena doesn't seem to be considered valuable or even a possibility.
Er, no. There is an actual privacy law with teeth if you're under 13 ("COPPA"). Companies don't want to be subject to any such regulation, so they choose to prohibit anyone under 13 from using their services. It's widely assumed that people under 13 simply work around these prohibitions by lying about their age, but as long as the companies don't have specific knowledge of this then legally everything is fine. Making the dropdown preclude ages under 13 could be interpreted as companies encouraging this behavior, and is thus a non-starter compliance wise.