skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How and when do you choose your specialization?
It's been a while I am thinking about my career path. I don't know how to choose my specialization. Do you explore until a certain age and then start to specialize? Or focus on one specialization from the beginning? How do you choose if you like all of them? How much should I optimize for money in my age? Do you prefer to be a generalist or an specialist?

Just to give you some context, I am 27, working at a FAANG company as a ML engineer since 2020

I am interested in wide variety of subjects:

- Classic web backend development (3 years of work experience)

- ML engineering (2 years of work experience)

- Applied research in deep learning (My master's degree is deep learning for NLP)

- Intersection of systems & deep learning like how to accelerate training, inference, .... (This is a new area I would like to explore)
> I've always been under the impression that science is descriptive, it answers how?

This may be philosophical, but has science ever actually, and by that I mean explicitly, answered how? Is how even possible to answer?

I think probably not, given our current understandings, or probably not just period. Science is about building models of the reality we experience. The models are not reality themselves, so they don’t answer how. They only answer how relative to our own knowledge and experience. Also, it isn’t clear if our experience of reality is objective. I have a feeling that there is such a thing as relative objectivity among the different participants of the universe.

> Whereas religion is deeper than that and aims to answer why?

Religion is more of an organizational collective of power and control, but religion proper, let’s call it, and spiritually are more about consolation, in my view. This is related to why, but I think it also helps to frame religion and spirituality as “what now”? We’re here, there’s this life, this Earth, this Universe, so what are we supposed to do? I think why creeps in there as well.

I’m reminded of A Serious Man and the repetitious “what’s going on?”.
Yes, we should abolish circumcision as well
It's a lot more complicated to crawl code somewhere in the web than to crawl github.

They could even change github so it benefits their code crawling.
From your perspective a Christian has faith in God solely because they want to. This perspective is somewhat ironic because in many cases Christians believe that they have faith in God because God gifted them the faith; in other words, they have faith against their human/created/natural desire to be autonomous and suppress the knowledge of God.
Ahhh they "values human life" thats why they developed killer drones in the past I guess. [0]

And that's why they censored the web via the Project "Project Dragonfly"? [1]

Never forget that you are a product for Google, and Google likes to kill it's products.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-dro...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
And is it because those strawman VCs are all stupid, or, is it somehow ...
Canada to ban single-use plastics to combat climate change, pollution
> Outside of online dating where are you even supposed to meet women now? I see women saying all the time they don't want to be approached in public.

I would be careful with letting a few anecdotes from a minority of women drive your behavior so much. There's nothing wrong with approaching people in public. Especially if you go to eg a bar, many women will be open to having conversations. I met my current partner this very way.
HLS?
IMO a slim “car” that can seat two people (F14 style) that’s a bit wider than a motorcycle (but can lane split easily) and hold a bit of cargo would be awesome.

It can go max 40mph and be awesome for city dwellers and delivery drivers.
Failure Is Your Domain
Didn't the VESA drivers require kernel code to switch to V86 mode to call int10h going all the way back to the 90s? Kernel mode setting might be new to a unform interface for graphics drivers, but using kernel mode (ring0) code to switch graphics modes goes back to the early beginnings and the simplest drivers.
> The language, at least for now, is Rust.

What are the alternatives in the context of Chromium development as a replacement for C++?
> The only way e-kerosene makes sense is if its production uses less CO2 than traditional oil extraction and refining.

Yes -- hold that thought! As noted above, e-fuel is made from green energy and captured CO2. So, net zero, more or less, after the fuel is burned. But traditional oil extraction doesn't begin by capturing CO2. So, burning that fuel is carbon positive.
It’s very, very different:

−160 °C vs -250 °C and liquid density of 450 vs 70 kg/m3
Tracking down what's causing lag in OBS can be quite difficult. I've seen people using the same capture hardware as me get input lag for local display down to one or two frames when I never got it under two seconds.
I fully agree with your perception of CCS but i think it's only a small historical detour of about the same scale/level of harm as cellulosic ethanol or concentrated solar thermal used to be. Tried, failed, moved on. No one bets the farm on it, Fit for 55 plan for example, makes no mention of CCS.
> We already have free health for the poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

There are tens of millions of people who have no access to Medicaid because states chose not to expand it under the ACA, and there are plenty of poor people who make more than ~$16k a year, which is the cut-off for Medicaid.
Sort of. Academic theologians want to answer why. A religious person already knows, if you have to find data and infer things then it is philosophy not religion. Religion is based on information directed by the creator either directly to the believer or via trusted proxy. For example if you asked me why the universe exists I already know: because God willed it so. Most religious questions are a whether or not something is the will of the creator and how to implement that will. Of course that is monotheistic but with hinduism for example their many gods do things and that is why things are, how to do things to align with them is also a question as is with buddhism and reincarnation based on how well one implements the universe's will but my point is religion is what is there based on the answers to the questions you mentioned not the pursuit to answer that question. If you come up with a religion on your own I suppose you can call it that (although I must question the difference between that and a philosophical principle) but religion as is organized religion already has answers for the believer.

Tangentially, I am a bit baffled by folks that are not believers yet try to make sense of a religion, don't they understand hierarchy of belief? As in you need to know arithmetic before you can do linear alegbra? How can one understand anything religious without being theistic (buddhism aside). Most of the common atheist questions about faith are easily answered with the prerequisite of theism fulfilled for example.

The fundamental difference between science and religion in my opinion is that science says "I will believe things only if I can understand them" while religion says "The things you can understand and that are beyond human capacity to understand are described this way" religion is based on the acceptance that one cannot understand all things in reality, that things beyond our understanding or currect capacity or ability to know are still real and have effect in our reality.
> Oh right, the US built GPS, one of the few GNSS systems out there!

When US opened up GPS for civilian use, there was NO other GNSS. Other GNSSes exist BECAUSE of GPS.

> You mean by sending a few chosen people in space?

This is how every new thing starts. Do you think people one day had no cars and then suddenly a billion people were driving cars the next day? No! It started with a few who had the money and believed in the future to invest in cars, and further few who could afford to buy cars and were OK with the initial dangerous, horribly unreliable vehicles that the most ill horse of the time would be superior to.

If you read up on the history of literally any tech, that's how they start, and literally that's how they are received (e.g. waste of money, more important things to do, few chosen ones, etc.).

> I don't feel like there are thousands of successful social networks

Your feelings bears nothing on reality. Go do a app search for dating/social apps and you'll see hundreds, with dozens being pretty successful.

> But I get your point: SpaceX is a nonprofit with the purpose of solving the climate crisis

No non-profit will ever solve anything at this magnitude, by definition. This is what it boils down to:

- You need to have a plan to make profit

- in order to attract investors to give you money,

- so you can pay talented people to join your cause.

Yes some of your employees are there because they believe in the cause and they're fine with lower pay. But that's a minority. Majority of your workforce will want challenge and good pay or you'll lose them to the competition making social network apps for iPhone. I'm baffled that most people can't follow this simple logic.

> My mistake.

Never too late to learn.
C++ _easily_ has many if not more quriks than JS. There have been over a half dozen major revisions of the language since ~1988. Each one added in sometimes dramatic ways new syntax or idioms that required major relearning. If you learned and used C++ in 1995 you would be a liability if thrown into a modern 2015+ C++ codebase (well a liability until you learn all the new quirks and changes in the language).

You might drop into a C++ codebase from 1990 that looks more like C (it was made to be mostly backwards compatible after all), then see a codebase from 1999 that's chock full of the most cryptic template metaprogramming imagingable and complete spaghetti structure of OO "design patterns", and then see a codebase from 2010 making much more heavy use of the updated standard library and a functional style of programming.

The sheer scope of C++ as a language is frightening as it requires quite deep knowledge of the parts you're using. Sometimes even deep knowledge of the history and rationale for parts of the language you're using existing. And if you screw something up you might silently introduce a major security hole, OS crash, or worse--the language gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself from.

Oh and there's no standard build system, no standard package manager, no standard project layout, no standard for code formatting, documentation, etc. Everyone has their own bespoke solutions that make the JS world look amazing in contrast.
What would be the natural, opposing movement of a barbell squat? Doing force in the inverse? That's a completely unnatural movement pattern. Standing up and carrying weight is about the most common denominator in human movement.
Try to actually sell them something, that's the best way to get genuine feedback :P Until money is involved (or the hassle of account creation, I guess) it's all play to them.

Perhaps more useful answer is to be part of a practitioner community, as you noted.
With Copilot it's 10 lines of code by thousands of users.

It adds up.
The Onion has a pretty good article to cover this sort of thing. https://www.theonion.com/man-who-lost-everything-in-crypto-j...
Went nowhere in the sense: did not result in sex? Then it's certainly something the guy was doing wrong, the girls are going for Tinder dates specifically with that goal. The OP said they they "did not result in anything serious", so i assumed it meant "no relationship", but this is simply not what Tinder is for. Yes i know a lady who built relationship from Tinder, but she had to do about 500 dates over 3 years go be able to pick the right guy, it was exhausting and not an efficient way to do it for sure.

Spending 15 hours to get 3 hookups is good. One could do more swipes to get more, spending proportionally more time, if the city they live in is good enough (and yes Tinder is a numbers game so it works for guys only in big cities)
There are threads here debating the trade off between a) the marginal time gain from not shutting the lid pre flush and b) literally spraying less shit into the air.

Truthfully, from the bottom of my heart, I love hacker news
I'm 36 and I've only ever known the Arpanet story, and I'm techy enough to be here.
... only to cancel it after a few months?
I don't think investing in short-term at-the-money options would be a good strategy because you'd lose a lot to premiums. It'd be better package long positions on the low-fee ETFs mixed with some deep otm options as an investment vehicle. Love the concept!
> if there sleep isn’t sufficient

Sleep studies can tell if you have sleep apnea, where you might "think" you had a full night's sleep, but it was disturbed by disrupted breathing.

So it might be worth getting one anyway. Hopefully the tech will get to the point where your fitness watch can do it all. The last sleep study kit I had was quite bulky and wearing it probably affected my sleep!
But Wikimedia isn't a company, it's a nonprofit foundation.
Having dated a very competent yoga professor and knowing many very decent yogis, there's definitely a bunch of strength to it but even with my poor genetics and half-assed weight training I was definitely stronger and had an easier time doing yoga than they did lifting, by a substantial margin.
> So today, lots of Christian churches are adopting newer translations of the Bible. But the Mormon church is stuck with the KJV forever because Joseph Smith established the tradition that that's how God sounds when he talks to us. We can't just produce a modern translation of the D&C because it's supposedly the primary source!

You could, though! It would probably be comparably controversial to translating the Hebrew Bible into Modern Hebrew:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh_Ram
I agree that this is a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong. It's very clever and fun. But it also suffers from a lot of problems traditional solutions like street addresses and the use of landmarks don't. Those issues have been well-documented elsewhere.

The biggest issue this type of solution faces is a lack of standardization. There's this, What3Words, other people's hobbyist versions, Google has something like this built into their map product, etc. Every additional implementation is yet another nail in the coffin of the very concept.

The only way it would gain traction is if it were a government-mandated system. But every government already has one, and the benefits of adopting such a system don't outweigh the costs yet.
Sometimes I wonder if the core problem of this disagreement depends on the certainty of our understanding of information - how it works and scales.

This isn’t a strong rebuttal to this paper, though I read it closely, enjoy both sides of the mind-body problem, and do my best to seek some sort of external truth in the matter…

But I’m inclined to disagree with Jaron on the following point: What if the contents of the mind (consciousness notwithstanding for a moment), which surely must include information or data, doesn’t represent the complete anatomy of the systems involved in the mind-body problem. What if subjective experience is an objective realization of some sort of a information-vitality singularity.

Then we could not be confident that the argumentation (mainly the metaphors) in this paper accurately model reality - at least as far as I can tell.

And that’s really it: What if the mind-body problem, with its dual objective/subjective complexities, cannot be modeled until we first understand consciousness. Put differently:

What if we can’t model the M-B problem until we first solve it.

Perhaps objective experiment? Some sort of truly demonstrable proof by induction? Whatever gets us away from abstracting the problem itself. In the meantime, I’m fond of some of the various theological approaches. And if I was put to the question, my bet is that this answer is unknowable.

I’m not sure if I’m a zombie? I’d rather be a cynical zagnet; I certainly don’t think that subjective experience does not exist.

I ought to buy anyone who reads through this comment a drink. Here lies my knee jerk reaction. Thanks for posting, and thank you to Jason for giving me a bit to chew on.
> the misfeature of prototypal inheretance

Prototypal inheritance isn't a misfeature, it's an interesting and powerful language design choice used by several different languages [1]

It may not be your cup of tea, but having written code in most mainstream languages since the 80's, I can tell you I definitely prefer it to alternatives like class based inheritance.

Runtime mixins are one of the most powerful composable concepts in any language, and this is a breeze with js. Take a look at the hoops c# had to jump through to come up with something similar but less powerful, as an example. Or the nightmare of multiple inheritance in C++.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype-based_programming
By HLS I mean streaming to browsers. HLS is HTTP Live Streaming.
I’ve noticed that asking leading _negative_ questions opens up people a lot.

Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product)

User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.”

I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.
> second/third-trimester abortions that are not "the mother's life is in danger" are incredibly rare

Correct, and since it doesn't affect many people, a legal ban to protect innocent lives is even more achievable than it seems.
Or like governments issuing bonds in foreign denominations.
How do you find the memory consumption of those apps? I found NVIDIA Broadcast and a few other streaming utils were passively eating like 3GB of RAM. Not typically a concern until you're spinning up VMs and dev environments and suddenly getting paged.

I'd love something like Broadcast but much more lightweight, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.
Somewhere in the vast halls of the Library of Babel are a set of shelves that precisely mirror this author’s arrangement of books at home.
> Recessions tend to last a couple years.

No, they don't. The Great Recession—the longest recession since the Great Depression—lasted 18 months. The COVID recession, the most recent and shortest post-Great Depression recession, lasted 2 months. The median post-Great Depression recession has been 11 months.

EDIT: Also, however, note that the upthread comment was more about the length of bear markets, not recessions. Those are somewhat correlated but not equivalent.
LMN 3, an open source DAW in a box [video]
Also to note, he had horrendous form and was victim of the painkiller downward spiral, product of his various back surgeries.
Yes, but you're not answering why it's better to convert the captured CO2 into e-fuel rather than sequester it directly. My point is that converting to e-fuel instead of direct sequestration only makes sense if you can produce e-fuel from carbon more efficiently than you can extract and refine oil.
I love it, the principles really hold up to decent scrutiny.
They can if you give them consent to sell your organs. Works with advertising.
Couldn't agree more on the "go into the real world" point. It's insane to me, I can be on a dating app swiping through tens or even hundreds of profiles and never get a match. Yet I'm almost guaranteed that if I try to strike up a conversation a couple of times out & about, it only takes me a handful to get to a compelling interaction.
Not here in Australia.

Have a look at: https://www.kwm.com/au/en/insights/latest-thinking/ccs-in-au...

(Burrup is the one I mentioned)

Thats $250 million of committed funding to a range of high scale projects by the gas industry, coal-seam gas included.
That's what I ran at my old job and I definitely miss it at my new one, where what I have is Windows with MSYS2 and WSL.

Plasma feels more predictable to me than Windows does, and I really like what it builds into the desktop environment itself. The essentials— window management, the volume mixer, global keyboard shortcut configuration, the panels, the desktop, compose key support, the default terminal emulator, the network management applet, display configuration, the default GUI text editor, the file manager, etc.— all feel just right to me, with very little tweaking required. What configuration is required is straightforward in the GUI and super easy to automate or save in my dotfiles.

Some of this is my own habituation to Plasma's quirks over the years, and some of it is my usage patterns not intersecting with open issues that Windows users would likely find strange. But I do think it's genuinely a wildly underrated desktop that a lot of developers would quickly come to love if they gave it a chance.
Also don't forget that the Supreme Court has ruled that APIs aren't copyrightable after all (or at least fall within fair use).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_03JJ7Ca5g - This is a discussion on The Audio Programmer which give some examples and some motivations behind it.
Yea fair point. I should have expanded in my own piece. Thanks for that.
> See above; no such minimum size is needed.

How are you distinguishing between "particles" and "particulates" if not by size?
> it exploits the listeners basic agreeableness

100%

The initial gambit is to make the reader part of a clever in-group by out-grouping “zombies”, then the writer proceeds to quickly gish-gosh a bunch of concepts that would require lots of further thought, but instead expects the reader to just go with it. You can get anywhere if you just go with it

Edit: But I do like JL on other subjects. I think it just proves the point that Plato made in the Defence of Socrates
I agree with you about depression also being a biologically dubious category. Lynn Waterhouse's publications focus on criticising ASD (and its predecessor diagnoses) in particular, but I very much doubt she thinks the rest of the DSM-5 is all fine–it is simply that autism/ASD is one of her core areas of professional/academic specialisation, in which she's spent much of her career, so that's where she focuses her criticisms.

Discontent with the DSM is very widespread, in significant subsections of both research and clinical communities – however, attempts to dethrone it in practice are met with opposition from that other current of professional opinion ("it obviously is far from perfect but we need something and nobody's convinced us there is anything better"), and that other current seems to thus far be winning in the money/power/mindshare stakes.

> The wastebasket diagnosis means that no new medication can be found to have any useful effect, because it only treats a small fraction of patients in a trial, and worsens others.

New pharmacotherapies for depressive disorders do get approved – in 2019, the FDA approved brexanolone for post-partum depression and esketamine for treatment-resistant depression; before that, the FDA approved vortioxetine in 2013. Agometaline was approved in the EU in 2009 and and Australia in 2010, although its manufacturer gave up trying to get it approved by the FDA. And there are further new drugs in various stages of the approval pipeline. Brexanolone is particularly interesting as a drug to treat a rather specific form of depression rather than just "vanilla depression".

No denying it could be better, but depression is a much better situation than autism/ASD – although risperidone and aripiprazole are both approved to treat behavioural issues (irritability and aggression) in children with ASD, neither has any impact on core autistic traits (social cognition, obsessiveness, etc). At least for depressive disorders, we have approved pharmacotherapies to treat their core symptoms, even if they only work for some patients some of the time.