skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of these threads (though I for one welcome more because there are always new resources).

It would be cool to see more follow-up posts about how it's going or where they ended up.
Study slowly

Don’t skip through anything

Do the exercises
Oh darn I see that an edit I did made it confusing and I didn't re-read it anymore (edited again for clarity just now). I meant that planes are very loud whereas trains usually just whizz away.

There are indeed some old trains that were very loud, I remember the NL Mat'64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Mat_%2764) where my phone (uncalibrated, so it'll have been wrong but I don't know by how much) said the employees had to be offered hearing protection and my subjective experience would say the same. For the 8 minutes that I spent in those local trains, it was perfectly fine and also hearing-safe afaik (don't try to drown it out with music as I did, though :/). Since the retirement of this model a few years ago, all trains I've been on in NL/DE are much quieter.
Hahaha omg is this real, hilarious - where can I see more?
I agree with everything but your first sentence. You didn't say infinite growth is possible but is continued infinite?
Unit testing is also frequently very artificial and disconnected from production use of a codebase. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of value in checking whether things you wrote actually do have the effects you intended.
"Let's treat the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda as an intellectual exercise in the free marketplace of ideas instead of a humanitarian crisis"
The parser for Scheme is simple because it doesn't have reader macros. The parser for common lisp can't really be simple (see [0] describing building a JSON syntax extension to common lisp within common lisp).

If by "lisp" people just mean s-expressions then yes s-expressions are really easy to parse.

[0] https://gist.github.com/chaitanyagupta/9324402
SWE to lawyer here.

The analogs of the traditional coding interview in the law school world are the LSAT and classroom timed memory tests. Both have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with being a lawyer or the kinds of activities that lawyers actually do.

What they are are intelligence tests. They are easy ways for judges and top tier law firms to tell if you are "one of them." You can get your foot in the door if you can perform, at a minimum, at a certain level. There are plenty of things you can do without 97+ percentile LSAT and A's in law school, but you are screened from the top echelon of work.

People object that this isn't fair and screens good people out -- false negatives. But experience has shown that it is effective and easy. Perhaps there is a better way, but this way seems to work well enough. There is little incentive, beyond some people complaining about it, to change a system that is working well.

I see the traditional leetcode interview in the same light. The point is to see if you can perform at a certain minimal level. Yes, it's arbitrary, and often unconnected to real life. But it is an effective way to gauge a minimum level of intelligence and competence. Not perfect, but easy and effective.

Finally, there is ego element to this. People who can perform at this level see these skills as a minimum qualification. They are uncomfortable seeing themselves in relation to others who cannot perform at this level. Knowing that their peers have similar minimum qualifications makes them feel safe and secure about their status. This is not a criticism, just an observation about human nature. People in a club need a shared identity.
The font is there to set a mood and context.

It has to be legible, but it also has to signal what readers are going to get.

No one is going to set a science fiction novel in this. It would be too weird.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_English_typeface...

Similarly using different fonts for title, subhead, and body gives readers a preview of the content.

Abolition is good for the title.

Personally I didn't agree with the subhead choice because I thought it was too on-the-nose and cliched.

But it's a fine line, and originality always has to be balanced with expectation.
There are sprinter trains with only one or two stops early in the morning and in the evening.
I was a student in France and during the two years of high schools I had a bunch of blackboard exams and yeah, you kinda have to learn the material. Of course it also helps to be confortable in such situations, but we had enough of them to get trained in that
No, they definitely pay income tax on rent. HMRC deducts any rental income from your tax free allowance on income ahead of time in fact.
> It's shocking to me that this professor is surprised that cheating happened under these conditions.

I think it's a bit of laziness and religious mentality. In US it is believed, I think, that making the rules, framing them in language of morality and harshly punishing the ones that don't obey them is as good as understanding and solving the actual problem.

Holy word, sin, punishment.

And when enough money is involved you my go light on punishment which is beneficial for enforcers and provides outlet for people who otherwise would bring down this system and replace it with something more reasonable. There's so much gray area everywhere under the overt strictness of the rules.

This mentality is visible in so many systems in the US.
Code and Law Are Similar
> he won the nobel peace prize in 1952.

Though not due to saving earthworms I believe. ;)
Most people who voted, voted Tory and Brexit, they're majority positions. Neither of which are to do with being anti-foreigner.
> I know even Ukrainian refugees were shocked at how archaic German paper based bureocracy was compared to their home country which moved to digital, as they expected Europe's richest country to have much more efficient bureocracy than Europe's poorest country

Ukraine isn't the poorest European country, Moldova is. (Well without counting the war, and i don't think we can accurately estimate it's economic damage).

As for the bureaucracy, it's actually quite easy to understand once you think about it. It's the same reason why Estonia was a frontrunner in eGovernement and eIDs - when regime change happens ( communism is replaced by a democracy-ish), lots of existing things (laws, institutions) are "tainted" with the aura of the old bad regime. So there's lots of impetus, desire and excuse to change all sorts of things. On the other hand, in a country Germany, even with the absorption of East Germany, things have worked, there's momentum, so there's not that much desire to just change everything.
This is q learning based so ML.
Removing duplicate lines from files keeping the original order with Awk (2019)
High fractions of C are not needed. AI with an unbounded lifespan can be content with very low fraction of C travel.

Travel timescales need not be on human lifetime scales.
IMO oral exams and open-ended answers are the kinda things that really work better for their intended purpose, and everyone knows. But people still prefer multiple-choice because "they scale". The goal isn't simply measuring knowledge, it's doing so in an acceptable/shitty way, with (edit) limited resources.
Ask HN: Problems while submitting post, is this normal?
I tried several times to submit a short post sharing the recent release of the latest version of a package. However, the submission does not seem to complete. This seems weird because I have done it before. Is this due to some recent change or setting?
This is the best resource I've found as well, for creating a lisp from scratch. Thanks to mal, I created my own lisp in JavaScript in just a week of coding in my free time! Granted, I write Clojure every day for the last years, but I don't think it's really required, but certainly made it easier.

mal has also been "featured" on HN a couple of times in the past. Here are some discussions:

- 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121448

- 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226110

- 2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670442

- 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924344

According to the schedule, we're bound for another frontpage feature of mal in 2023, looking forward to it :)
It will stop owning the internet when we all stop using Google to find information.
The alternative is to treat higher learning like any other experience in life or on your CV/resume: you do it, you tell people you did it, then you either convince them that doing it imparted something useful on you or you don’t.

As someone who’s hired plenty of people, exams and grades do not help one bit with the process and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them.

The only good use of exams I see see is as a potential entry gate, administered by the place you’re trying to impress, to get onto a course, be considered for a job, or be given a license to do something. As exit gates they’re just noise.
I often did 6 hour train trips between Switzerland and Austria and some other routes.

I take my laptop some snacks and just enjoy the time.
> HOW do you measure knowledge?

This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal of the measurement is. There are two main options.

1. Measurement as part of education process — for the sake of both teacher and the student.

2. Measurement as part of external qualifications — for the people who would later use the credentials achieved in measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job offers.

Most of the problems with different measurement strategies happens because people conflate the two.
It becomes obvious when you ask them to explain the code. At my university I once overheard a boy and a girl presenting some code "they" had written to a TA. The TA asked them some basic questions on while-loops and function calls. It became obvious that the boy had written all the code and the girl had no clue. So the TA decided that the boy had passed but that the girl had to come back and present the code herself on the next session.
Just do it? Offer classes, don’t record grades, at the end have an optional oral defense that results in a certificate.

The only people who actually care about your college grades are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that’s it.
Looking at the universe and the abundance of waste solar energy being emitted, it doesn't seem like there's much competition going on for energy.
> the biggest reason is tax free plane fuel.

This. Most people don't realise that the biggest reason flying is so cheap, is it's subsidised by the state in every contry in accordance to rules of international aviation, whereas train companies must pay taxes on any fuel they use.
You can change the pypi index URL with `pip config set global.index-url`.

For example, as a Chinese, I often switch to `https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple`. You may need to look up which one is available and faster in your region.
yeah, that's wrong.

For example the ICE from Hamburg to Berlin tomorrow at 14:35 goes directly, not stopping in Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Brandenburg.
Assume for a second that your goal is to teach knowledge, as you say.

How are you telling whether you are successful at that?
Even if you do not care about the personal individual achievement level (or whatever) of the students, you still need to be able to measure to understand where you are successfully teaching, and not, so that you can change/improve/etc teaching.

As the comment you replied to said, you can't just wish these problems away, and they are not easy things.

The overall thing is not a problem, they are systems.
They can't be "solved" through simplistic answers
Both stellarators and tokamaks appear as Möbius strips to confined charged particles. The key difference is that the toroidal transform is applied via induced toroidal current in a tokamak whereas it's inherent in the magnetic field geometry of a stellarator. We're in the middle of the golden age of stellarator geometry research and optimization. It's a very interesting problem with large payoffs for modest investment.
My parent's house, bought in 1970 for £4,000 sold for £32,000 in 1986. That was the high inflation of the 1970s to blame. But a house I bought in 2000 for £185,000 sold for £550,000 in 2015. That wasn't inflation to blame but supply and demand; the demand being the vast increase in UK population from 2000 on.

If you're happy to accept mass migration, that's one of the effects as is bigger class sizes in schools, more traffic on roads and an overburdened NHS.
Ask HN: Introductory Logic Text?
I’d like to learn formal logic as a self-guided beginner for the purpose of building a better mathematical foundation (I stopped in high school) and improving my programming.

I was taking a look at Gensler's Introduction to Logic but the reviews suggest that it might be better as a second text than a first. What books can HN recommend instead?
Maybe we should require anyone graduating to take a FizzBuzz test before receiving the diploma.
I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the point of view ascribed to Ive.

My takeaway though is that the device itself and how it should look/work is not obvious, and that is a bad thing.

For a device like the iPhone, iPod a few people kicking around ideas over sushi could very quickly (and with wild enthusiasm, no doubt) come to agree on the basic form, basic functionality.

If our VR-future has to be shoe-horned into existence, maybe it was not to be.

If anything, I want to see "the cyber" go away, not become more pervasive.
HN is very much opposed to whiteboard interviews. I can't see this being a popular alternative.
Your brain is solving math problems.

Culture is community. It's writing. Art. Shows. Architecture.

AI is learning from this, and is seeing it. We are now in community with AI.

GPT-3 shows basic understanding of concepts and appears to be reasoning at times. While we know how to train these models, and we know the processes they run to evaluate weights, for example, we are still learning about how semantic based information and computation forms "thoughts".

In my opinion, When AI is given dynamic memory instead of frozen memories, we will see this manifest in a very obvious way. It's a computational limitation right now, but we all know where compute speeds are going...
> mankind could never deploy them at scale because we simply don't have the resources.

I don't understand what your objection exactly is. That's just a way to rephrase my statement: magnetic confinement, as it stands, is too capital intensive to ever break even financially, regardless of the experimental success ITER/DEMO might have.
I liked the interactive style of the tutorial but maybe we can change up what's right and wrong and let the user pick what feels right to them and compare before and after.
Netflix drives the accents nowadays.
Hard to hit two skyscrapers with a train.

When it comes to railway terrorism, there are more effective infrastructure threats than some guy boarding a passenger train with an explosive.
Because many of the costs of their irresponsible practices are externalized.
It is probably worth that collectively, to other people that might consider working for Kyte in the future.

Rescinding an offer is a fairly big deal to me...you've likely invested more than 2 weeks of time (he mentioned 6+ rounds of interviews) and effort and walked away from some existing job and probably other offers.

It reads like there's less than 200 employees there, total. So there's not really a good argument that one hand didn't know what the other hand was doing.
I think the UFOs never were out of discussion. What I feel implied here is the alien factor, which is makes zero sense. If a civilization had the resources to come visit us, we would have been destroyed/enslaved by now. And this not taking I to account the laws of physics, that state a maximum speed to which anyone can travel, and even at that speed, it would take years, or generations, to travel to close by stars.
What does LARP stand for?
I gave that a try but because I didn't have any experience with C before, I found it hard to learn both C and how to build my own lisp. Instead "mal" (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31547901) makes no assumption about what language you want to use, and instead explains everything conceptually so you can implement your lisp in any language you want.

The repository of mal also features a implementation for basically any type of language for reference, in case you get stuck.

Fun fact: mal originally was made to see if you could implement a lisp with just GNU Make macro language (spoiler: you can!), after the author saw someone else making a lisp language in bash.
The restriction on the market is largely arbitrary - people “don’t wanna” let other people build apartments on land they own. The only real reason they do this is regulatory capture - if someone who owns land slows housing production on other people’s land, theirs is worth more.
> There is no comfier way to travel

Have you not been on business class flight?
I’m in a very similar position. I didn’t go to uni and somehow found myself in a programming career. In a few weeks I’ll be sitting A-level (UK advanced high school) Mathematics exams for the same reasons as you. I’m 32 years old.

I’ve found having formal exams to study for very motivating, and humbling. I thought I knew things I’d read in books, but it turns out I just recognised them when I came across the same topic again. Being able to recall concepts and use them without help under time pressure is a different level of mastery.

Can you sit high school exams as an adult in the US? There might be private exam centres in a city. That way you’ll _know_ you’ve learned the math(s) you need, on top of all the great learning resources linked here.

—

Edit: Cambridge International do A-level exams, with centres accepting private candidates globally: https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-and-qualif...
Live Action Role Playing
Does not feel like stability but instead maintaining status quo.
So report the teacher. The whole snitches get stitches thing needs to stop. We aren’t in a goddamned prison yard. And if someone actually threatens you, call the police. Raise hell about it. Gangster, prison yard culture needs to die. Cheating is never ok. Cheaters should be thrown out of school with zero second chances. People in the US are often going into debt for tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for college — when people cheat, that diminishes the value of that extraordinary expense. Not to mention honor and integrity ought to matter.
To give some more concrete numbers, I estimated the time from Google's office in Berlin (Tucholskystraße 2, 10117 Berlin, Germany) to Google's office in Paris (8 Rue de Londres, 75009 Paris, France).

Option 1 (plane + taxi) - taxi to BER (45m), check-in/security/wait (1h), BER-CDG flight 1h45m, exit (20m), taxi to the Paris office (1h) = about 5 hours.

Option 2 (plane + bus) - bus in Berlin takes 50 minutes, in Paris takes 1 hour, so about the same, but I'll add about 30 minutes because the schedules might not mesh so well = about 5.5 hours.

Option 2 (train) - taxi to Berlin Hbf (6m) or walk (25m), train to Gare de l'Est (7 hours), taxi (13m) or walk (28m) to the Paris office = about 7.5 hours.

Agreed, 5 extra hours makes a same-day visit tougher (10 hours of travel vs 15).

Plus, to start there's only one day-time direct train route, while there are more flight options.
Depends on the route - I've never not had reliable phone service and internet on the TGV or Thalys networks ( i used to work on the Paris - Amsterdam train occasionally and it was completely usable).
A quick 5 minute video on Babbage and his engine: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=XSkGY6LchJs
Might have been worth mentioning in your existing reply above to the person who said that. I'm kind of wondering who to believe now: one the one hand there's the silliness of the rule that makes me inclined to think you must be right; on the other hand there is my experience living in germany and their love for rules and bureaucracy (whoever spawned the phrase 'german efficiency' must have been sarcastic).

Edit: ah I see you added an example. That settles it then, thanks!
Moreover, SETI really only detects signals intentionally sent straight at us (beyond a small bubble of a few light years where only a handful of stars exist). It's not powerful enough to detect ambient EM radiation around other stars.

The only conclusion we can derive from SETI results is that no one is beaming a signal at us intentionally and continuously.
Yes but, you're asking a hammer salesman to see that a problem does not involve nails. Tech wants to tech.

Like you though, both figuratively and literally, I'm not buying VR.
There were far, far fewer clickbait headlines or articles about science in public media 40-50 years ago. We have a modern epidemic because this kind of coverage now plays an unfortunately large role in research funding. It needs to be corrected because it erodes public trust in science.
The AI That Draws What You Type Is Racist, Shocking No One
That's a good link. But a fairly shallow dismissal.

Both yours (you are quite an active participant on HN, so you are very likely aware of the site's guidelines) and theirs (the authors of the presentation).

The wikipedia article on fusion-fission presents the downsides of the idea much better I think.

The link you provided appears to be some type of high-school debate level of argumentation.

The final report issued by MIT [1] at that 2009 fusion-fission forum is much more balanced (and more informative).

But overall, the negative tone of the report rests on the assumption that fusion is "just around the corner". It is not.

Their argument is roughly: we need research both for a pure fusion reactor and for a fusion-fission hybrid. Let's not get distracted with the fusion-fission, and invest fully in fusion. Which they call "the grand challenge" and "transformative".

The thing is, we don't need "grand challenges" and "transformative" things for their own sake. We need stuff that works. Fusion-fission reactor may be complex, but is clearly achievable. Fusion by itself, not in the foreseeable future.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/fusion-fission/Hybrid_Report_Final.pdf
> But with -fno-exceptions all exceptions cause a panic which stops execution of the program, right?

plenty of cases where this isn't the case.

-fno-exceptions just means that you want to not be able to throw for your own code.

-fno-unwind-tables / -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables makes your own code un-unwindable which is only safe if you are in entire control of the whole codebase, which is very rare in anything that is not simple games - no plug-in system, or any dynamic code loading or JIT'ing is safe as you don't know which user-provided function you call is going to throw.

Likewise, you could be in the opposite case: imagine you're making a C++ plug-in for, say, 3DS Max, where error reporting is done through exceptions ; even if your own plug-in code is built with -fno-exceptions and does not itself throw at any point, you still want exceptions that may be coming from a 3DSMax function you called to propagate to your code back to the exception handler provided by 3DS Max - and for this RAII of your own types is needed if you don't want your own resources to be leaked.
It’s funny because the Canadian leader of the federal NDP was pretty reluctant to blame the terrorists who did this…

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/opinion/article-the-stra...
I should have made that clear: there is no such formal rule, although there are quibbles like that where regional politicians demand additional stops.

That's the system working as intended, though. People like to laugh about small cities like Montabaur or Limburg getting ICE access but it turned out that the regions benefitted a lot from that access and after two slow years the demand for high speed train access in the region exploded.