skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author is quite the character

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard
Problem is I doubt most voters really care about right to repair. I’m sure if you picked someone off the street and explained it they’d say “yeah that sounds pretty” good, but at the end of the day, when they go to vote or when they engage in politics at all, they probably don’t care about whether a candidate supports right to repair, they’re likely going to focus on some popular issue, he that abortion, taxes, big foreign affairs, guns, culture war topic of the week, etc.

They’d rather have a lame duck Democrat/Republican than vs Republicans/Democrat that’s diametrically opposed to them on big popular topics. Those get people to the streets.
This is part of a continuing series I'm writing on hospital prices.[1] We've collected over 300M prices as part of our hospital price bounty on DoltHub. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

[1] https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-05-06-the-most-expensive-h...

AMA
I did Go for around a year and found I'm not its target audience. I need to build database-backed web apps quickly and, while possible in Go, it wasn't easy. Rails is a dream in comparison for that purpose. I experimented with many of the Go web frameworks, but it felt very much like a square peg in a round hole.

I really liked Go for what it was, but it wasn't the right fit for my set of problems.
>Why would the fact that the loans are now from the government mean that universities no longer had to compete on costs?

I think an economist would say that the loans increase the number of "customers" who could now afford to go to college. Accordingly, when the demand increases faster than the supply, an economist would say increases prices are the result. There's an old op-ed by former Education Secretary William Bennett that gave rise to the "Bennett Hypothesis", where he said,

"If anything, increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase … Federal student aid policies do not cause college price inflation, but there is little doubt that they help make it possible."

However, I've casually seen a bit of research that refutes this claim and instead states the primary driver of tuition increases is reduced public funding.
There was also a lot of work in this area in the 90s leading up to the y2k (non)event. Mostly back then it revolved around cobol, which was understandable given y2k impact was in many cases related to legacy cobol systems. A lot of architecture visualization and recovering business requirements from code. I did some work on diagramming mainframe JCL files for example.
> Meat production has become less land intensive compared to 200 years ago, but it is by far the worst way of producing food if you compare calory intake to land use.

Most meat, at least in France, is raised on land that couldn't support other kind of agriculture. The calorie intake of that land, without cows grazing on it, would be 0.
It basically means instead of measuring "papers published" they chose to measure "papers published per year"
> put all your money into leveraged! assets (stocks, housing),

Spoken like someone who has only operated in the recent bull market.

Using a mortgage to buy a reasonable house that you can afford is a good idea.

Using leverage to buy as much real estate and/or stocks as you can get away with is a terrible idea with some significant downside risk. Leveraged stock purchases are notorious for working great until the market turns and blows up your account. Even leveraged funds have significant slippage that isn’t obvious to the casual investor who thinks they’re just going to get a clean 2X return.

One of my most poignant memories from the 2008 crash was watching a few people I knew go from feeling like they were financial geniuses to bankrupt and struggling. The common theme among all of them was that they were leveraged to the hilt in real estate. They thought it was easy money when it felt like the market could only go up. Then it stopped going up and we all know what happened next.
For me, Go solved a lot of issues that I've had with both C and Python.

C is a nice language because there's no magic happening - functions are only executed if they are explicitly called. However, C had problems with strings, memory management, resource cleanup, undefined behavior, and probably a few other things I can't recall at the moment. It was also not designed with concurrency in mind, and glibc for some reason doesn't support static linking.

Python is a very nice language to work in, but there is a lot magic going around with all those Python protocols and magic methods. I also find myself making a lot of errors using exceptions - exceptions can happen at any point and there is no way to anticipate them, other than documentation, which leads to try/except boilerplate. And if I want to handle exceptions on a more granular level, I find myself writing try/except for every line I call, which is 2 lines of boilerplate - same as "if err != nil {" and "}". Also, CPython has a lot of dynamically linked dependencies, which makes containerization more difficult. There's PyInstaller, but PyInstalled doesn't seem to play well with non-pure-Python modules (uwsgi, for example). And concurrency in Python is terrible because of GIL, and asyncio is far from perfect, considering function coloring and inherent single-threadedness.

Go managed to become a language with a feel of Python but with certainty of C. It's like someone took C, fixed strings, added anonymous functions, automatic memory management, defer keyword for resource cleanup, sane concurrency model with channels and select. I think the name "select" comes from the Linux select syscall which allows you to wait for multiple file descriptors until one of them is ready - same thing happens with select and channels in Go. The select syscall (and its descendants) is the bedrock on which the whole asyncio world relies upon, so Go's concurrency design is already proven in practice.

When I write Go code, I'm rarely worrying about an exception popping out of somewhere. Panics do happen, but in most cases, they are caused by truly exceptional errors and warrant a crash.

And even though it's not a "systems language" in a kernel sense of the word, I've used Go to write video4linux applications, so it is certainly capable of making ioctls and manipulating C-like structures.
Also it's statically linked, so it's possible to make really small containers with it, and easily cross-compiled, which is nice for portability.
A.k.a.: Why just have a single thing (a statically compiled binary), when you can have several moving pieces and different levels of infrastructure and configuration to worry about (the hypervisor, the container runtime, the container cli, the open ports and shared volumes configuration, the host OS image, the JVM inside the image, java memory and gc tuning, and so on)
Thanks man. I never owned a Newton but the device looks interesting. I figured Apple learned a lot from it to reach the pads.
> "There are very few tools the US administration has because the biggest drivers for gasoline prices are driven by global fundamentals," Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler said. "You can make decisions on domestic supply, but if it doesn't have an impact on the global picture, it won't have an impact at the pump."

One of the most overlooked tools... reducing dependence on oil. If supply won't budge, we should attempt to reduce our demand. It's odd that with all the issues plaguing the US because of higher oil prices, many governments (local, state and federal) refuse to acknowledge that our built environment has made us entirely dependent on oil for the foreseeable future.
In professional circles, maybe you see some people retiring sooner than they would otherwise would have. Don't know. I haven't really seen that myself though. [ADDED: That's not really true in healthcare. I had two primary care doctors retire on me over the course of a year.] Certainly I've seen a fair bit of motion among fairly senior employees between companies but I don't know how it compares to the baseline.

What anecdotally is the case is that there are a lot of staffing issues for service sector jobs.
> ...the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper...

In other words, the size of an A5 sheet of paper. C'mon Ars!
If you didn't do that, who'd pay the taxes or cut your hair?
I'd say to force anyone speaking in public to have a graph showing who gives them money and who they donate to.

Similar to the Nascar idea, but with that we'd see larger podiums used to hide the more embarrassing fundings.
> it really just makes me feel like the authors performed this study with a certain agenda / chip on their shoulder. You may notice that both authors are men.

I highly recommend you look up OpenPsych and Kirkegaard, and even the Ulster Institute of Social Research (and its president Richard Lynn). You will see the extremely obvious bias of the authors
MAMMA is my go-to
My streaming life is mostly Radio Paradise and GrooveSalad (both). I’ve spent time looking for more stations to love (esp since my car streams TuneIn) but I haven’t really found other stations out there to listen to on the regular. They’re pretty singular.
Easy with the conspiracy theories! We all know the rich and powerful don't ever work together to accomplish things in secret.
And even with all those troubles, it's still doing better than many many programming language, which was my point. The Google boost seems to be real and big.
It's not confusion, is about clarifying that "fast" is contextual...
Thanks for the feedback! I have tried placing the Wordle word in a few different places, but haven't settled on a place that looks good and doesn't make the Game Over flow too complex/jarring. If you want to see the word, it is actually visible in the game, but not in an intuitive spot. When the game ends, the word counts next to each row become clickable (if the count is <=25). You can view the words possible remaining at that stage. The Wordle word will appear all green.
$5/[US]Gallon = $1,32/litre = 83p/litre

Last week when I stuck some diesel in the van, here in UK, it was:

£1,81/litre = £6,85/[US]Gallon = $10,87/[US] Gallon

You don't know you're born!
i have to shoutout to another online radio station that is run in the same vein as SomaFM https://vintageobscura.net/
Ironic, because when climate comes knocking, it's gonna be farms
turning to dust and blowing down the road.
AWS, GCP and Azure trends on Stackoverflow since 2015
Scientists’ New Algorithm Warns Us of Unseen Asteroids Heading Our Way
rocketchat already had federation, but it is/was awful
What would happen if the same logic was applied to gun control.
It’s interesting that fuel prices are literally at the bottom of the list.

Government/poor leadership is 19%.

Inflation, 18%; Economy 12%.

Then we’re in single digits:
Top of single digits is Immigration at 8% - no clarity on what angle but I think everyone can agree it’s a mess, no matter how you want it changed, which probably accounts for its comparatively frequent mention.

Fuel prices are at 3%.

Also of note is that 70%+ of respondents thought economy was getting worse, while 20% thought it was getting better. I wonder what those 20% are comparing to? Depths of Covid lockdowns?
Um.. elden ring?
In my case my git usage is so mundane that the most basic of its CLI commands are sufficient 98% of the time. Reaching for the more advanced commands is so infrequent that they don't ever stick meaning I'm always looking them up (and probably subsequently screwing them up).

My work is scattered across different IDEs/editors too so the differing UI conventions of integrated VCS make that more trouble than it's worth.

So I just use Fork all the time. It covers base case very well regardless of the project, and on the occasion that I need to do something more fancy I can do it without pulling up docs and with far fewer screwups.
It's a supercomputer. The programming model is very, very different. The software stack is full of incredibly fragile stuff from any number of manufacturers. It's honestly hard to even describe how much more difficult using MPI with Fortran on a supercomputer is compared to anything I've ever touched elsewhere. Maybe factory automation comes close?
There is:

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/federal-reserve-meeting-inf...
I recently attended a sales meeting for group health insurance reps at Blue Cross Blue Shield of TX.

They are going all-in on HMO plans. Of course everyone remembers how unpopular HMOs were in the 90s, deservedly so or not.

The Apple Newton figured prominently in their presentation. Like the Newton, they argued, the HMO was premature to the market, and suffered from lack of supporting infrastructure, despite being ahead of its time in many ways. Today's HMO could be the iPhone.

I wasn't convinced, but it was cool to see the Newton again, out in the wild.
On the Spectrum, on the Guest List
I remember the debut of the Newton. My father took me to a showcasing event that Apple had at the time (I was probably early high-school at the time).

This was years before Steve Jobs' (in)famous big unveiling events.

After that, I wanted a Newton so badly...never did end up getting one. Alas.
This is true for so many other aspects of life as well. Things are the way they are for a reason. Not understanding the deep and complex factors that got the system to where it is dooms you to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is why I go for depth on what I complain and ideate on rather than breadth. Dive deep on something you care about instead of having an opinion about everything. Humans have done well with specialization. If you enjoy breadth, go for it. I just don't see it as very effective.

I suppose that complaining without proposing solutions is akin to protesting. You may not necessarily know what you want specifically, but you don't want the current system.
I've stopped playing Wordle, after I missed it twice. My strategy was to use up letters of the alphabet in rough order of frequency: STONE, LAIRD, CHUMP, GAWKY, but occasionally varying the choice of the next word when I could think of a better one.

If the word was PATCH, like most other times I would have played

S(T)ONE

L[A]IRD

(C)(H)UM(P)

after which PATCH is obvious. If you hadn't played that strategy, but you knew it was ?ATCH, you should divide up the candidate initial letters P, W, H, B, C, L, M: e.g. BLAME, CLAMP (neither of these is possible, but you would gain information). CLAMP would have confirmed it was PATCH. If neither word helped, you would at least know the unknown letter is W or H: two more guesses at worst.

I did once fail to guess after six tries. The word was FOYER.

The new game looks interesting, and the strategy winning (failing to choose the word) is less obvious.
Related, the documentary "General Magic" is quite good, and mentions how Apple's Newton sort of undercut the proto-smartphone being developed by apple veterans at General Magic. So many people saw the future but the tech wasn’t quite there.
No, they mean that they control for 'career length' ... e.g. an academic with 5 years of history is likely to have a better score than one with 2 years of history.

So they effectively compare women-with-1-year vs men-with-1-year, etc. etc, rather than 'women with h-index 5' vs 'men with h-index 5'

edit: should be "Women with h-index of X after Y years" rather than just "Women with h-index of X" (e.g. they control for Y years' publishing between men and women, assuming that time-in-academia is correlated with h-index. Quick glance at the paper suggests that time-in-academia has R2 of 0.62 with h-index)
This is similar to the St. Petersburg problem. The way I satisfy myself with that answer is to note that it's kind of a spherical cow problem. Nobody in the real world can afford to run this game, since it requires an infinite amount of money -- even a currency issuer would expect to just make their currency worthless by running it, and an offering of physical resources instead of currency would violate thermodynamics in all sorts of ways.

Spherical cow problems often end in counterintuitive results.
Cost was definitely a consideration (although not the only one) in deciding whether to store all created links vs. just a blocklist.

Once we got to a mode where we were only doing computation per request, the raw cost is pretty minimal since there's not much CPU time either way.
Hi. In Fork you can expand/collapse nodes in the graph. Collapsing all (i.e. --first-parent) and then expanding particular merge commits is also possible.
This is actually really scary. As American universities become less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.
Monado's hand tracking: hand-waving our way towards a first attempt
Hasn't this been the case for the entire pandemic? Yes people think it's getting worse, but it's largely been economically good for the last 24 months besides inflation
Sadly I almost never saw one in the wild, even in the Valley, but TBH, hardware and software hadn't yet reached the point of viability.

I'm glad the author mentioned the knowledge navigator concept video/s (were there two or just one? I can't remember any more). The iphone handily picked up that baton, but wisely didn't try to do so right away. But the NN vision was almost 20 years too soon.
Assume for a moment that research output is affected by time in the field; either older people publish less due to resting on their laurels, or older people publish more due to greater experience allowing them to publish with less effort; I don't know without reading the paper which is true.

Now consider what happens if men are (on average) more experienced because up until recently more men entered the field than women, but then the trend reversed. If you just compared female to male research output you could come to the wrong conclusion; the difference in experience could overwhelm the difference between sexes.

So there are various statistical tools you can use to measure the difference due to experience, and subtract it out from the difference between sexes to get a more accurate measure of the difference due to sex. Doing this is called "controlling for a variable"
It is more common that you imagine. In my case, the story is that some people have literally been porting the same C code base on multiple computers first, and embedded devices later, since the late '80s. Given their lead engineer is literally 80 years old now, the client once again slap YMODEM on their latest device, which uses BLE to literally emulate a good old serial port and pass data on it using YMODEM. It sucks, hard. They were quite puzzled about why it ran so badly, and I didn't have the heart to tell them it was because the whole thing was incredibly idiotic.
Beware that your method of construction is risky to your demonstration: the python compiler does do some limited optimisations, and trivial constant folding is one of them.

If you test at the shell it apparently misses it (though it works for smaller strings e.g. "abc" / "a" + "b" + "c"), but if you put the same thing in a file and run it, it'll tell you the two strings are identical.
How to Prevent the Coming Inhuman Future
It was quite literally the pinacle of data storage and management.

There's a whole host of advances that were made from, say, 1800 -- 1950, which we mostly gloss over. The technologies seem obvious today, but were considerable:

- Iron, and later steel, replacing wood, in printing presses.

- Steam and later electricity, replacing human power, in printing presses.

- Roller, and later web, paper transport rather than a platten and screw press.

- Much cheaper paper manufacture. With concommitant problems of acid pulp paper disintegrating over time. (The late 19th century Librarian of Congress reports have extensive appendices on paper manufacture and technology: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi...

- Index cards. As of the 1880s, the US Library of Congress printed its catalogue as a set of bound volumes (distributed, among other locations, to customs offices at ports to check for imported contraband pirated books). This proved increasingly nonfeasible as the collection grews.

- Loose-leaf bindings. The whole notion of a codex-arranged book to which pages could be added or removed was a novelty. The convenience of a book, the manageability of a card catalogue. You'll find numerous loose-leaf mechanisms in late 19th / early 20th century stationers' catologues and patent filings.

- Standardised business correspondence. As information technology has improved, the personal and flowery nature of writing has eroded. "Telegraphic" writing emerged with that device. Printers and publishers such as Twain and Franklin had a physical feel for words set in type, as well as cliche and stereotype (literal physical blocks of unchanging text). Massive departmental enterprises with either geographically-diverse (railroads, telegraph companies) or technically complex (chemical and refining operations) required management of procedures and information flows out of necessity.

- Punch cards would have been another alternative to the Czech archive shown here, though cards would have had limited capacity (80 bytes/card), with limited human readability. Compressed data formats originating on cards gave us the Y2K problem.

At about the time the Central Social Institution was opened, advances in photography, microphotography and microforms were underway.

This was also the period in which the US Library of Congress Classification was being developed, a history I'm exploring myself presently.
I think that's the point is that it does seem rather ambiguous as to the intent. If someone is new to programming entirely, what are they thinking is happening with an operation *on obj.a or obj.b? If they know other languages and are just starting out learning Python, what expectations are they bringing from those languages?

If I had had magic wand, I'd make operations on class attributes from an instance a syntax error, and only allow it from the class name, and perhaps with special syntax like in C++, e.g.:

A::a = (1,)
A::b = [1,]

*edit: operation on obj.a or obj.b...
> Just like the envelope game, right?

No, because you're not actually wagering anything in the envelope game, so it makes no sense to calculate probabilities as though you are.

An analogous coin toss example would be something like: I'll flip a coin, you call heads or tails. If you call it right, I'll give you $10. If you're wrong, I'll give you $5. (So either way you make $5, so I don't know why anyone would even offer this game!) After I flip the coin, I'll conceal it in my hand and give you a chance to change your choice of heads or tails. Well, of course there's no reason to change your choice, it's completely arbitrary! You've got a 50-50 chance of winning $10 regardless. The paradox makes you think you're wagering your unknown potential winnings, but you're not actually wagering anything.

It has nothing to do with calculating whether or not a specific wager is worth it given some set of probabilities. That's a different problem for a different sort of game.
I've tried moving my teams to mattermost now twice and always we ran into the issue that integration for live meetings was painful. Neither zoom nor Google meets was possible to set up in an easy to use manner so everybody could jump on a call when needed
You've hit the nail on the head. So many jailbreak exploits have been done because of Webkit exploits. Allowing other engines on the phone would make them lose control over their walled garden.
> we never didn't fit in a 4-door.

Well of course, presumably if you didn't fit there would have been no trip :-)