skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive.

If the variety is the same I generally can't tell with things like onions, potatoes, and most fruits. As for flour you'd be hard pressed to see any difference. I bake and brew and spend some time looking at spec sheets for flours and barley and organic/not doesn't really register as a difference. Price tiers matter, but that doesn't correlate well with organic. It may be the case that less intensive agriculture makes sense for non-staple crops, but that isn't the issue here, we're talking about things like barley, wheat, corn, soy, and rice.

I'd also mention that organic doesn't mean anything about soil health, size of the farm, or really anything other than some specifics about chemical application.

> Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2].

This is largely being solved by a shift to no till agriculture.

> Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature

This strikes me as religion, and not a judgement based on science or economics. Switching to more responsible irrigation, and reforesting old agricultural will go a long way towards alleviating those issues. More crops from less land leaves more land for undisturbed nature.

> Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO²

This is a great case for returning more former crop land to forests.

> And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species!

It isn't really a bandaid, it's taking a traditional technique of using beans to fix nitrogen in depleted soil, and giving that trait to other crops. It's pretty amazing in fact. Humans have always shaped landscapes on REALLY large scales, and we going to continue to do so just by our very presence. It makes sense to use every tool available.
I can recommend the following:

John Derbyshire's Unknown Quantity - A real and imaginary history of algebra

David Well's The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers

William Dunham's The Mathematical Universe - An Alphabetical Journey Through the Great Proofs, Problems and Personalities

Alex Bello's Alex's Adventures in The Numberland - Dispatches from the wonderful world of mathematics
VR Device Lets You Feel Water Fountains, Mud Splatter, and Crawling Bugs on Lips
The problem is that this data is available for anyone to purchase. And anyone includes groups that you don't want to have it.

Some people focus their attention on limiting the government's ability to collect this information, but just go about ignoring businesses being legally allowed to keep and sell this data. Now the government is leveraging privatized markets for all of their spying needs and it is neatly kept out of the courts.

As the article points out, it wasn't just the CDC performing these kinds of analysis. News organizations were doing the same thing.

If we want to curb government surveillance, we need to curb corporate surveillance by legally enshrining a right to privacy that limits the information that companies can collect and sell. Which, ironically, will mean government regulation and enforcement.
Because I write Python to plug into a bigger ecosystem and I can mix and match Python and Hy freely. I can also use Poetry to package and manage dependencies and Poetry2nix to output a Nix derivation that is guaranteed to run on someone else's machine. I can also freely tap Python packages like Beautiful Soup or use frameworks like Django (which I am). The entire Python universe is available to me. The number of accessible tutorials for Django, videos for Pythonistas and community support channels is monumentally large. I even get to do cool things like use Django's ORM for learning how to interact with and manipulate data in Postgres, all right there available to me.

I can use Discord (despite my distaste for it as a platform it has a huge Django and Python community), Telegram, IRC, and Matrix to ask for help and get metric tonnes of friendly advice, suggestions and criticisms from Pythonistas.

And I can take all of this at my own pace, writing only bits in Hy and branching as I go. Every step is as gradual as I want it to be.

Common Lisp is not the answer to my needs. Presenting it as so is tone deaf at the least.
If you have a formatting operation that outputs some number of chunks of text to a stream, using some dynamically dispatched output operation which does something similar to writing to a buffered output file, you can use it to produce a string fairly easily, as long as it fits in memory: you implement an output operation that appends to a string buffer. This is close to optimally efficient except when appending characters one or two at a time, in which case the extra dynamic dispatch overhead may be significant compared to whatever else you're doing to choose those characters.

If you have a formatting operation that produces an in-memory string, you cannot use it if the amount of text being produced is too large, or if you do not know if it is too large. But if it is not too large, you can then output the string to a buffered output file, although this is less efficient because it involves an extra copy and potentially dirties a lot more memory.

So these two ways of handling formatting are easily interconvertible when memory permits, but in some circumstances only the first one is applicable, and it is always more efficient.

Therefore, when reliability or efficiency is important, generating a formatted string should be implemented as a layer on top of sending formatted output to a stream, not vice versa.

There are cases where reliability and efficiency are not important, because your code is being used by end users and not as part of a library, and an error message is also an acceptable result of trying to run your program, and in those cases you should probably write your program in a language like Lua, Python, or JS.

It is probably true that if you are used to languages like those, a lot of design decisions that are necessary for reliability and efficiency will be counterintuitive to you.
Monkey Island 3a
when working on a large code base, I found it productive to take a slow walk outdoors to some urban construction site, with all of the action that involves. Also I have done serious construction myself in the past. Construction terms, analogies and tooling names make a lot of sense to me when thinking about software systems some days.
The products were always under one company, the company was just named the same as their main product.
Heartless people will write a 1,000 word article outlining the injustices of not being able to get a haircut instead of feeling the least bit sympathetic to the deaths of millions or complying with the steps taken to prevent even more from dying.
Scrolling, navigating! It makes a huge difference once you are used to a higher refresh rate!
>This is pure supposition based on no evidence.

Unfortunately for your argument, their policy speaks to their attitude, which is "fuck what you think". Anyone with a basic understanding of human power dynamics correctly interprets this policy as "in a year all you peasants will be back with your arses in your seats where we can see you". The statement is the evidence.

>But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.

The fact that you have a problem with this proves our point. You are not approaching this from the perspective of "how can I empower my team to do their best work and make us all a ton of money". Your frustration is "I know better and these idiots won't do what they are told".

And the fact that you claim to be unable to understand these basic ideas means that either (a) you do understand and are lying or (b) are incompetent, and in either case, your team has come to the correct conclusion.

I look forward to hiring a ton of Apple devs while also being disappointed that macOS will continue to get worse.
And virtually all that research is wrong. It's full of stuff like "here's a Russian bot whoops no that's actually a Scottish car park attendant". Or "here's an ML model that detects Russian bots oops it detected Biden as a bot".

The quality of evidence for this idea (really, this conspiracy theory) is absurdly low. And it remains true that nobody was spreading this idea up until the moment it became clear that the supposed Russian sock puppets appeared to be supporting both sides in the election. I remember it quite clearly. The supposed Russian master plan changed overnight after that.
No offence to the other members of haxx, but I suspect Daniel's site is the only one that gets enough traffic to be considered for filtering.
That makes no sense at all. People can have consensual sex without wanting a child and they can change their mind about wanting a child after having consensual sex. I'm curious if you apply the same argument when the mother wants a child and the father does not. What should happen to the child in that situation?

The abortion debate should not have anything to do with whether a child will be born or not. The right to an abortion is part of the right to fully control your own body. That right should be absolute and inalienable unless waived voluntarily.
I can imagine them being fairly competitive in iGPU performance and single-threaded CPU performance (especially if they're shipping with 3D Cache), but power efficiency is going to be a bit of a struggle for AMD until they adopt big.LITTLE. I think the big thing to look out for is the integrated graphics stats though, AMD has been shipping iGPUs that stand neck-and-neck with the M1's offerings for a few years now (the 4800u's Vega graphics were pretty close to the 1050ti-tier numbers we saw on the M1). If AMD is iterating meaningfully on that front, I can foresee a new generation of SOC gaming/video editing machines.
So it's still near a town/city then?
Not everyone can afford to hire good coders, so they get what they pay for.
I think we're very close to it if not there already. Additionally, the prevalence of long Covid will likely force some companies to re-examine previously sacrosanct employment structures such as the 5 day work week or nothing.
Intel Adjusts, However Slowly, to New Realities in the Datacenter
Can you explain what non-gaming means and what your issues with the gaming monitors are?

Dell and BenQ are the best brands in my experience.
Yes, it does actually surprise me that a company would spend $5 billion for and tout the design as the second coming of office Jesus as an "incremental office build".

I indeed did not realize that Apple Park wasn't the primary office building in that area, especially because of some of the articles that came out at the time. It's why I asked the honest question I did.
> Give me work to do and leave me alone to do it. That'll solve a lot of the burn-out.

Yeah but this really translates to asking management to actually do their job, and letting you do yours. Any hint at this attitude will get you in a world of trouble.
I get American style chips from a nice restaurant near me.

Yes. This is a thing, and they taste pretty darn good. Hot, fresh chips with some scallions and spices tastes way better than any prepackaged chip you get from Frito-lays.
It was the book that coined the name "the singularity" so far as I know.

It's also an unusually good wikipedia page for a science fiction book. Often I want to post something about what I think is a seminal sci-fi book (say Sea of Glass by Barry Longyear) and it's hard to find anything substantial written about it on the web at all.

(Maybe that's my cue to start blogging again...)
> Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.

I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only.

> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.

Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately.

> Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).

When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
Wouldn’t it make sense to have the news released closer to the mid terms?

By leaking it, they’re having the news released further from the mid terms.
Why not? They are not forcing you to use it.. If you don't like it, how hard can it be for you to ignore it?
> just braindead blocking software purchased by incompetent managers.

Having been that IT person early in my career, responsible for
networks, firewalls and policies, what you say sounds cruel. But I
could not agree more. Today there is a tragic de-skilling in ICT. When
I speak to modern corporate or academic IT people I make the best
faith assumptions. I assume they are like we were in the early 90s and
speak to them accordingly with technical respect. Then I discover they
cannot configure a mail or web server, cannot compile a program, or
even use a package manager... they don't know how to read logs or
change permissions on a directory.... the mind boggles. I've had
senior IT people tell me that they're "not technical" and it turns out
they've arrived on some "management track" from an arts-history
background.

I'm not knocking arts history, or being "elitist" I hope, but this
raises serious concerns for me. What is going on in IT? Have cloud
services, tick-box webmin interfaces and packaged solutions led to a
brain drain?

One could argue that modern IT people don't need "geeky computer
skills" any more, because Google and Microsoft have solved everything.
But that doesn't pan out, because when simple things go wrong they
cannot fix them (which is their job). Right now I am dealing with an
international university whose impeccable pedigree is bedrock in
computing history - and their IT people cannot fix a simple email
issue, to the extent the staff and students have to set up their own
servers. The fact is, they just don't have control over it any
longer. I think the entire senior ranks are just marking time till
they can retire.
There is also another model about memory which I totally love. In that memory is not stored but brain is more like an antenna which can retrieve information from the space time coordinates where events actually took place.

Because everything is constantly moving around something each event in the universe probably has unique location, a real physical place where it happened.

So, the idea is that as we’re moving through space we’re leaving a trail as the events are (lack of better word) “printed” in the fabric of space. Then as apparently Space is not empty at all but filled with Planck scale micro wormholes entangling all things into this one universal neural network, then our brains should be very well capable of tracing back our unique trails through space and retrieve information through those micro wormholes.

As developer I think it would make most sense to only save references rather than trying store all events inside everyones brains. That would be huge waste of resources and just damn stupid.

And probably the way we humans have built our computers also reflects how the universe really works, because after all we are bits of the universe doing whatever the universe is doing.

Peace
There are ongoing smaller scale cycles of violence and retribution in parts of the US driven by rap diss tracks posted on social media.

https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/entertainment/music/y...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-chic...
Because it is about status and control. They want to see all the busy-bee activity in their expensive buildings. Workers have been asking for WFH for years, the pandemic proved it could work even for the sudden and untrained.
I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with.

I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an instance or two
> Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients

Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of my current main side project.
I’ll take the risk of extra crime or terrorism as a cost of privacy as a human right, thanks
https://bractlet.com/careers | Full time | Austin, TX or REMOTE | Multiple Roles

I'm cofounder and CTO of Bractlet; we’re on a mission to solve climate change by using technology to enable energy efficiency.

In a nutshell, we turn the budget and energy consumption of buildings (usually office-centric skyscrapers) into an engineering optimization problem using data (collected from the building with a proprietary IoT platform) and software (including calibrated thermodynamic simulations). We've helped some buildings save 30% or more on annual energy spend. Our stack is primarily React, Rust, Ruby, and Postgres.

If that sounds interesting to you, we have the coffers to grow fast and we're hiring for:

- Lead DevOps Engineer
- Lead Frontend Engineer
- Lead Backend Engineer
- Fullstack Engineer

You can read more about what we do at https://bractlet.com, and email me at brian [at] bractlet [dot] com if you're interested in applying or learning more.
Thanks. I will read this and update the summary. I have updated the book link to point to the second edition.
And what is it exactly that is so uncomfortable? Is it the idea of failure or is it the feeling itself? What if you got comfortable with all your uncomfortable feelings? When we were growing up we got use to all kinds of new, uncomfortable feelings. Why not keep doing that? Let the feelings happen, get use to them. You might find yourself freed from a prison you didn't even realize you were in.
> The complaint that returning to the office will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce is maybe the most absurd attempt yet to destroy RTO plans.

It isn't. If you are disabled, black, female, or older, an open-plan office is not a comfortable place. It's a halfway house for frat boys, but people for whom being unfairly evaluated and unjustly terminated is the kind of thing that happens at least once in a career do not, in general, do well in it.
Thought so as well first. But then again, you can write

for (let i=0; i<10; i++) {
console.log(i);
i++;
}

And it correctly logs "1 3 5 7 9".

So if anything, the desugaring would have to be something like

for (var _i=0; _i<3; _i++) {
let i = _i;
setInterval(() => {console.log(i); i+=100}, 1000);
_i = i;
}

Haven't tried out putting closures inside the condition or incrementer to see if things get even weirder.
Server World
There is value in working in-office… just not enough for me to give up remote work.

I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails.

I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.
Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful.

At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.
Is anyone trying to argue it is "exactly the same experience"? Most of the arguments I have heard in favor of remote work is that it is superior experience, on the whole.
Elaborate on 'I'm not certain the benefits add up'
My main sources of burnout these days are: 1. useless information overload, and 2. lack of focus time. And it's rare that I've actually met a manager who could even see this as a problem.

My main way to deal with this: just ignore 99% of my incoming notifications. The only notifications I need are "SLA is broken". Everything else should just be low priority async systems, and honestly, email worked pretty well for this but everyone just loves using Slack or a similar tool now.

And the entire business loves to work against you too...

Most of my managers have just loved throwing juniors into the mix with no structure on how they'll be mentored - just let the senior engineers figure it out. Ergo, I now have to periodically check Slack and review notifications again just to make sure none of the juniors reached out.

Oh, and don't forget the other random people who grabbed your name from delivering a bug fix six months ago and just want to check on a thing "real quick" or ask a "small" question.

Modern office communication is a clusterfuck, and probably contributes more to stress and reduces productivity more than any other aspect of work. And trying to remedy this as an individual contributor is usually unsustainable. It's a management problem, and sadly, this "management toolkit" gleefully avoids this.
I didn't mention Rust (beyond mentioning you discussed it). You seem very Rust obsessed.
I would suggest different wall colors and some daylight.
I think you often forget about this because promises are made that they won't touch anything. So you're being genuine when you say "nothing is going to change" because that's what leadership promised.

Trying to maintain this is a major fight that generally gets you fired or you end up leaving out of frustration.

It's hard to see if when you come in with business like Postmark that is loved by its customers because you think "We're a great business and we know how to do things, why would you want to blow that up?" but you need to remember that the acquirer (ActiveCampaign) is looking out for themselves (ActiveCampaign) first.
Yeah, I spent a period in my 20s fairly poor; I wasn't homeless or anything but I worked two jobs, didn't own a car, and had to exercise extreme discipline with my budget. I can agree that the "spend less" solution is logical but doesn't actually work. "Whoa look at you big spender, with your $10/mo Netflix subscription!" In all seriousness, I could suggest working in a grocery store or restaurant so you can "obtain" free food. The way I got out of it was by applying for jobs in a different area and borrowing money from family to move.