skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a question. I keep hearing about so many problems with the way things are done in the US. The tax filing system. Mass incarceration. Problematic police departments. Reproductive rights. Privacy rights. And on and on and on.

But few (if any) representatives seem to want to fix any of this stuff. I see no progress. Just an ever increasing partisan divide based largely around religion and an "us vs them" mentality.

Where do we go from here? Does this stuff ever get better?
Also fire month
> "80% of a developer's value is contributed in 20% of their time", that 20% being the time spent in the flow state.

Hum, no. One does absolutely not follow from the other.

If the Pareto principle actually applies, it would say that 80% of the development value comes from 20% of the time the developer spends in flow. And the rest 80% of the flow time adds only to 20% of the value. The same would come from the value from meetings and the time spent on them.

But do keep in mind that, about the Pareto principle: you can never predict the value of anything - those are only post-fact measurements; and those proportions vary widely, it's never actually 80-20.
I think the difference between your examples is timescale.

People are generally good at responding to acute, existential threats. We don't seem nearly as good at managing abstract ones that occur over long timescales. I just don't think we're wired to think about risk accurately in that way and, let's face it, most decision are made at an emotional, visceral level.
Thousands of threads is not a problem for any modern OS if you have enough RAM. Loom takes it up into the millions.

As for why the JVM can do this and you can't with other runtimes, it's because it needs a complex runtime with very tight integration between the compiler, the GC, the threading library and various other subsystems. That's why the moment you make a native call the JVM loses the ability to switch between the virtual threads and has to start up more OS threads to compensate - it didn't create the code that's running on the stack at that point, so it can't work its usual magic.

Fortunately the whole 'pure Java' movement of some decades ago means that actually you can do a heck of a lot of stuff without using native code. It's an ecosystem way less dependent on C extensions than most other languages.
> Ok, how about some other sources?

Heh, let me know when you come up with something that isn't a political hack publication.
sounds like garden-variety sociopathy or psychopathy.
But what if the component is a recursively nested logging tool?
I say this with earnesty: I wonder which came first, the military idea of 3:1 attacker ratio or the boardgame Risk 3:1 attacker dice ratio.
yes, but nuclear plants are also really capital intensive. Also, according to https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-..., the thermal and electrical energy costs of desalination are greater than amortized capital cost. Running primarily off of renewables will probably reduce the uptime to 70% or so, but will dramatically reduce cost to run.
Fingerprints and DNA, for instance, are significantly less trivial to fake.
There's tons of space in the US. It's just that lots of it's really humid in the Summer and really cold in the Winter (and, overall, pretty wet—go figure) and quite flat and you might have to drive an entire day or more to see mountains or a body of water that you can't see the other side of. Which, I can already guess some folks' reaction to that: "there are no mountains, huge lakes, or oceans within a 10-hour drive? I'd rather die than live like that!"

And I get it. It does suck, for all those reasons. It sucks a lot. But there's water, and millions of people getting by OK—if a bit fatter, partly on account of the outdoors being so shit.
Yeah it's called being born wealthy, and then becoming a billionaire.
I would add that not only is talking to the press boring it is fraught with risk. I would never talk to the press about anything unless forced.
Isn't the entire point of an AI tool 'discrimination'?
> if the risk was zero

no investment has zero risk.

in any case, the 90% tax would discourage the investment for some people - because that investment might not return enough to be worth the opportunity cost of consumption instead. The point is, more investments means more possible productivity in the future, and any consumption->investment switch is good.

This is the same calculus as wage tax of course, but since most people don't have a choice but to work for a wage, they don't need to be incentivized to work by lower taxes.
Does licensing relate to what Fruits currently offers, or will offer eventually? Or is licensing a separate responsibility and decision for the creator?
"What the heck were you thinking? If I am getting bank interest, I want complete security. Heck, FDIC. I don't see nothing like that here."
- Wade Gustafson, Fargo
TIL HN has an excellent duplicate link feature. It's my first time posting a link, and behold, teleported straight to the existing post.
You could say the same thing about Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison. Good luck convincing folks neither is a genius.
Between formulae and casks, package management feels first class. I can `brew install discord steam ffmpeg` and it all just works.
Why people keep inventing new schema formats? JSON Schema is not perfect but you can extend it to achieve all of what's in this schema format.
This is strong evidence that you can have it all financially and still be a miserable human. The most valuable skills are recognizing when you have "enough", and being content with keeping yourself company.
investments don't have to be "supporting businesses" for it to be worthwhile. Speculative investments also work.
A court just blew up internet law because it thinks YouTube isn’t a website
This isn't climate change. People try and make that argument by just looking at water levels. The water inflows are currently slightly lower than historical norms but honestly not by much. The big problem is ever-increasing consumption. Look at Figure 2 [1].

I'm glad to see California reject desalination here [2] because what that would do in essence is to further subsidize agriculture (who often don't pay for water at all) with expensive desalinated water.

California agriculture is simply going to have to adapt to less water-intensive agriculture. This may mean less agriculture overall. It's a matter of when not if.

[1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/12/us/california-water-desaliniz...
> implied you're looping over all the elements of x, whereas if it was just function composition it would return a function taking an index.

I think it's a mistake to make this assumption.

In C, if you saw:

f(g(x));

you wouldn't expect to be able to make any assumptions about how many loops are going on in there. Python programmers are often overloading their functions too, so you can't even say anything about x+y in Python. I actually think it's the norm that you have to dig all the way down to understand what's going on, and it's the same thing happening here: Yes either f or g might be a loop. Or both. That's just life.

At the end of the day, the only thing I think that helps with that is having less code to read (in source-code bytes).
Returning to the atmosphere is not really sustainable, is it? Sure, it enables a rainfall at some point, but not necessarily at the time and the place you need it next year.
Road Tanker Safety: Design, Equipment, and the Human Factor
Thanks for the comprehensive response.

> There's nothing fungible about any of these responsibilities, so no matter how many ordinary people you stack together, you'll never arrive at even a fraction of what a competent executive can do.

I think I'd disagree with that - you state it fairly strongly, but I think that each of the items you mention is possible to delegate and distribute successfully, to varying degrees. Much of that is aided by referring to existing patterns that have succeeded elsewhere.

> Executives rotate in and out of power subject to the ongoing favor of their stakeholders, but the hierarchical structure of retaining an executive to represent the will of those stakeholders remains in place because there's no efficient way to operate otherwise.

That I do find harder to challenge (and I don't necessarily think it's worth challenging). Conversation and consensus can arise, but even then it's useful to have someone to canvas that and say "ok, I've heard the commentary on this topic, here is our selected outcome".
Buy Now Pay Later and the Bad Debt Problem
Musk didn't really think this through before he acted.

A great way to spend a billion!
Yes clockless logic no handshaking
> "If it connects, it should work" used to be largely true

Gods no! There are innumerable devices with D-sub, mini-DIN, RJ-11, RCA, or TRS connectors, that put those connectors to entirely different and incompatible purposes. With entirely-incompatible electrical standards, even, such that plugging client-devices intended for one purpose into host-devices intended for a different purpose will electrically short one or both.

Remember the iPod Shuffle's "USB-A to TRRS" cable? Guess what happens when you try to use that cable to, say, plug your computer into your hi-fi? Or — less absurdly — into your TI-84 calculator?

The "Universal" in USB is in contrast to the DB-9 serial port, which was decidedly not universal. Yes, there were actual "serial ports" and "serial port devices" — the spec is called EIA/TIA 232, if you're curious — but there were tons of other things that used DB-9 connectors (male or female) but weren't EIA/TIA 232 devices. Plug one of those into a serial port, and poof! — there goes the magic smoke.

You don't have to worry about that with USB (including USB-C); USB ports and cables all follow a single unified electrical pin-out specification, whatever they're carrying. Even USB-C devices that mis-implement features like USB-PD (e.g. the Nintendo Switch) won't ever start an electrical fire, because — whatever logic-level protocol support they might have mis-implemented — they're still "USB-standard devices" on the electrical-pinout level.

Now, these are all fairly-old connectors I'm mentioning, so you'd think we'd have learned better by now; but special mention goes to the Atari joystick port (technically a type of D-sub connector), which is still to this day slapped onto arbitrary generic Shenzhen-special "TV plug-and-play consoles" — with no two devices being wired the same way, and so only actually supporting the gamepads the console comes with.

When you think about it, relative to this disaster, USB-C does guarantee you that 1. plugging any two USB-C ports together with a USB-C cable won't throw your circuit breaker; and 2. as long as both devices are data devices, you'll get at least USB2 data-transfer out of the arrangement (if you're plugging in a legacy USB2 device), and much more likely USB3 speeds. Everything is actually compatible with everything, as long as you don't care about getting the fastest line-rates possible.
> Someone at Thoughtworks sold Dominion Energy on the idea that Thoughtworks... if things go well, they will get follow-on business and maybe even a whitepaper.

...

> Market pressures don’t apply to internal teams

Market forces are constantly applied against internal IT teams, particularly in non-tech companies. The market force is replacing them with consultants. Sometimes they will make those employees train their own replacements[1][2].

Or that there are consultants that can't be fired. The project is over schedule, but too much sunk cost to replace them and no internal devs. A $6M project becomes a $1.25 billion project and fails in slow motion over a decade.[3]

Anyway, my point is that it's not as simple as "internal is always safe, consulting is always tougher".

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...

[2] - https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/03/after-pink-slips-ucsf...

[3] - https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/12/project-failure-case-...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525080945274998785

> Still committed to acquisition
It's still pretty bad while the prices are dropping for Patek and Rolex.

You still can't walk into a store a order a watch you might want. I already been waiting since 2019 for a Rolex GMT Master II (Blue) on a Jubilee strap, and that currently blocks me from buying a JlC Polaris and a Lange 1815.

Worst part is they advertise for watches in magazines that you can't buy
Well not quite. The problem is that it only takes one call tree with a deep stack to cause all that memory to be allocated (slowly, using lots of page faults) and after that, it's used. The only way to get rid of it again is to swap it out, which means if you then go ahead and do another deep call it's even slower as the kernel doesn't know what it can discard and what it can't.

Deep stacks are pretty common in modern software especially for Java software.
One point that I think is under-discussed in the AI bias area:

While it is true that using an algorithmic process to select candidates may introduce discrimination against protected groups, it seems to me that it should be much easier to detect and prove than with previous processes with human judgement in the loop.

You can just subpoena the algorithm and then feed test data to it, and make observations. Even feed synthetic data like swapping in “stereotypically black” names for real resumes of other races, or in this case adding “uses a wheelchair” to a resume. (Of course in practice it’s more complex but hopefully this makes the point.)

With a human, you can’t really do an A/B test to determine if they would have prioritized a candidate if they hadn’t included some signal; it’s really easy to rationalize away discrimination at the margins.

So while most AI/ML developers are not currently strapping their models to a discrimination-tester, I think the end-state could be much better when they do.

(I think a concrete solution would be to regulate these models to require a certification with some standardized test framework to show that developers have actually attempted to control these potential sources of bias. Google has done some good work in this area: https://ai.google/responsibilities/responsible-ai-practices/... - though there is nothing stopping model-sellers from self-regulating and publishing this testing first, to try to get ahead of formal regulation.)
The Modern World Can't Exist Without These Four Things That Require Fossil Fuels
Hawaii Big island you can decide your weather by simply driving to a higher elevation
My main concern is that this seems to be a precise lead. It might be unconsciously considered close to a real fingerprint.

Instead of facing it just as a lead, it might influence investigators to, consciously or not, build confidence in framing a (wrong) person and and end up building a compelling case against them.
I feel we could use more "government buys a thing, does a thing, sells the thing" - not quite eminent domain but also not entirely "let the market figure it out".

CA could have bought the entire UP for $150 billion or so, done a high-speed rail, and then sold it back to Buffet or whatever. But our system isn't setup to handle that kind of scenario.
Honestly, those ide's suck. Most of the time we only would use them for debugging, but the build system was usually some home grown thing. You get better control. The startup code really depends, you can use the stuff from the vendor, but a lot of the times, the needs are specific so you might roll that up as well.
Even if that part were a Ponzi, it wasn't related to the core problem with the stablecoin peg algorithm, which was what actually brought Terra down, and which could/would have been targeted regardless of this high yield staking program.
Pandas Tutor: Using Pyodide to Teach Data Science at Scale
Planet formation is a subset of system formation which is a subset of galaxy formation and all are within the same observational astrophysics domain.

CPU performance and aerodynamics are two completely unrelated domains.
He's a classic visionary with the ability to manifest that vision in others with his words. His track record speaks for itself, likely because of his vision and willingness to risk. He likely has strong skills in seeing positive outcomes and cast them as truths into others. He will continue to succeed in business outcomes, until his vision falters.
I'd frame it the other way. Most of human intelligence is really animal intelligence.

Rather than saying man is a "naked ape" I'd say a human is an animal with a language facility.

The point here is not to bring down the perception of our species but to raise it for animals.
I think some CEOs actually do that. For example the CEO of Boeing certainly decided to flush the thing down the toilet.
A first impression reading the "Getting started":

https://tokay.dev/getting-started/

How does the Tokay executable know that some argument is a string vs. a file?

# What if I have a file named "save the wales"?
tokay program.tok -- file.txt
tokay program.tok -- "save the wales"

# What if I have a file named '.+'?
tokay program.tok
tokay '.+'

This feels like someone thought this was neat because you don't need to specify `-e`, but it comes at the cost of ambiguity where your program does something different depending on the filesystem. This has a cost in environments where you're not in full control (e.g. when you distribute your executable for others to use).
Every step of the way some armchair comes up and concludes that Elon is broke and this deal won't go through.

Why wouldn't he put up more Tesla as collateral? How do you know he can't get more financing? How much BTC, Doge and eth does he have? No one knows how rich this man is, people need to stop acting like they do.
While we are talking about staff, then what's the meaning of "staff engineer" as in "high level engineer"?
I think the general problem is the law says certain correlations are fair to use and others are not. If you can prove the AI model has no way to separate out which is which you have a fairly sizeable amount of evidence the AI is discriminating. Likely enough evidence for a civil case.

Usually showing that input data is biased in some way or contains a potentially bad field will result in winning a discrimination case.

If neither side can conclusively prove what the model is doing but the plaintiff shows it was trained on data that allows for discrimination and the model is designed to learn patterns in its training data then the defendant is on the hook for showing the model is unbiased. For the most part people design input data uncritically and some of the fields allow for discrimination.
The two reasonably good looking human versions of baseball-astronaut are copy&paste of clipart or at least used it for reference:

https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/cat-astronaut

https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/id/267579488
I like how the answer to the whole discussion was "eh, let's remove the lion, that'll be fine".
Curious if you work in the field. Because in my experience, it's not like that at all. YMMV, I guess.
Whether the problems with the models are with general relativity, Newtonian gravity or other issues, the point is that the models have problems.
You're missing out. This is a very informative article, which should be required reading for anyone voting on water-related issues.
It seems there are millions of people who want to immigrate to the US and I suspect would be willing to move to such places, but they are not welcomed.
I assume they have rules around how you acquire, otherwise ask your company to make you a contractor so you work for $1 but have the right to buy $XXXX of crypto every month for another $1.

If you have the savings to live a year + happy with the risk you could be income tax free?
"Digital nomad", "sidehustler" or "freelancer" aren't actual jobs. What do these people even do? The actual developers are listed in the footer.
Food isn’t a free market activity and you can’t just shut down a huge portion of the production and not bother to even cursorily think about the rest of the system.

The point I was trying to make is that food security is one of the most basic elements of national security.

You can’t just stop farming in California (or raise the price to obscene levels) and expect things to sort themselves out on their own.

Basic large scale food production does not work as a pure free market activity. It would have wildly oscillating prices and large portions of the population would periodically starve. That’s during normal times, and is purely economically driven, not even counting a climate crisis.
Indeed. But it’s well documented that both Jobs and Edison were shrewd businessmen first, rather than technical geniuses.
Ask HN: Hiring managers why don't you post salary range in your job postings?
It is baffling that 90% of job postings out there or even on hackernews' who is hiring threads do not provide the salary ranges that's on the table.

As a senior eng/data scientist who is looking for a job change it is extremely frustrating to apply to every interesting job posting and spend 30 minutes in a conversation just to find out that they are not willing to pay more than what I currently earn.

This topic is so sensitive and wrapped under secrecy that there are multitudes of blogs, sites dedicated to teach people negotiate and reveal this information. I'd think putting salary ranges outright would even benefit hiring managers first attracting correct candidates and also saving their time.

otoh senior guys, while changing jobs how do you ensure that you only interview for the companies that provide better compensation than the current one.
yes, this is double taxation, which i don't personally like.

In australia, there's franked dividends, which basically passes the tax credits down to shareholders (effectively, companies pay a 30% tax, but give that same dollar amount as credits to shareholders, who can then use it as tax paid in lieu). See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/frankeddividend.asp
It’s appropriate for Facebook too.