skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the article has a sentiment that academia is wasted time. On the contrary. Of course it has its points, I agree.

I am a self-taught programmer who got later a CS degree. Also a self-taught entrepreneur who later (almost) got an MBA.

My experience is that these are much more valuable for people who already know how to do the stuff but missing the jargon and thoughts of a crowd of exceptionally brilliant people lived before us. I am talking about the scientists, inventors of algorithms, math, bookeeping, all the concepts. How faster you can tell complex thoughts when you just have the vocabulary to use. How do you even present a spectacular idea if you have to spend half an hour explaining something that you should have known has a name.

I never understand how some people get the hubris to think they can do better without all this. Of course if they feel they could not have used all these in their professional lifes - probably getting a degree would have been a waste of time for sure. Some of these folks of course are quite capable and can and will do big things. Also sometimes you have situations when you have to choose between your startup company and the degree. We know some successful dropouts. Still, I think there is big value here.
> The WSJ has a very different take: https://archive.ph/DKex6

Your link has nothing to do with any statement you made.
Oh it's a ponzi you say? Well if only someone on the internet had mentioned that sooner I wouldn't have wasted my time with bitcoin then. Let me just sell everything real quick...done. /s

Thanks for being casually insulting. I know Hacker News is full of those comments so I'm used to it, but I'm not sure how you expected me to respond to your comment there, or what benefit it would add.

Your comment comes off to me as if I said something like "Oh look, I just got a pet mouse!" and you responded "Mice are crappy pets. It's going to bite you and give you the plague."

For the record, I said buy every week (as in DCA, or just buy no matter the price, all the way up until now), and I'd be retired now. That's not 'buy at the bottom, sell at the top'. It's currently $20,000, and that's not "at the top", the top was ~$69,000 in Nov 2021, so now is nowhere near the top right now.

First crypto winter I held bitcoin through, the price was hovering around $200 every week for two years, so I could and should have been buying more that entire time, instead of checking the price every couple of months to see if anything changed and buying nothing.

But I probably could have accumulated at least 40 coins potentially based on my income then, with a few sacrifices (by that I mean less going out to eat and buying a bunch of random video games that I'd often play once or twice and never again...still a problem I have today, it just makes up a smaller percent of my paycheck now). I was excited in bitcoin even then, but I was also a lot poorer, making about 15-20% what I'm making now, and I also wasn't prioritizing it as much as I could have been.

Even still, I'm not dumping all my earnings into this stuff. I put far more into my 401k/stocks than I do crypto.
Analysis of a Spotify Scammer
You can’t destroy railroads easily. They’re simple to repair. Russia’s problem is they don’t know what to do when the train reaches the end. The HIMARS are destroying the ammo dumps because all Russia can do is unload stuff from trains and put it into one place, then truck it around as needed. They don’t have enough trucks or loading equipment to change this strategy. So if you need to get goods from Russia to the front, your only option is to train it a place outside HIMAR range and then truck the last grueling 100km which is really slow and ineffective. Not too dissimilar from the kyiv convoy early on.
In comparison to the BOOX - I love my Remarkable2 and it is a Linux box under the hood.
The thing is - the network being too slow is not a technical problem. We already have much much much faster networks, which is why VISA is used by so many more people than BTC for their money.

Also, unlike other technologies that can sit very comfortably in their niches, payment & more generally monetary technology needs to be used by the vast majority of people in order to be useful. I was pointing out that BTC or ETH will never be successful as a monetary technology, the way gold or fiat are, because they are impossible to access by the vast majority of people by their very design.

Can there be other designs of cryptocurrency that can solve this? Perhaps - time will tell.
Not a bad checklist (“model info sheet”)

But rather than stand-alone, it should be incorporated into publications.

In my experience, only a minority of applied machine learning papers provide even a minority of the info requested by the info sheet.

Meaning, you really have no proper idea how cross validation was done, what preprocessing was done etc. - in actually published papers
I think it should be noted that the Georgia Tech Online Master's in Computer Science (known as OMSCS) mentioned in the article costs about 7,000 USD, all-in for a 5-semester program. [1] This seems to me an amazing bargain for a Master's degree from a respected institution in the USA.

[1] https://omscs.gatech.edu/prospective-students/faq
Me as in western countries. If the west cuts all support for Ukraine - how long would they last?

If Germany starts freezing in the winter with no Russian gas, you’ll start hearing about “bringing about peace” real quick.
> Unfortunately, MS programs are nominally designed to build upon corresponding BS programs, so most CS master’s programs will expect you to already know the very things you’d like to learn.

Does the author know about conversion masters?
Moreover, just with the sheer count of VCs, stock investors and other sorts that play with their (or more often other people's) money to try and earn outsized profits, it is inevitable that a small sliver of them will be wildly successful. It's a statistical certainty. It's like having a million people toss coins all day and then hail as geniuses those who got twenty heads in a row.

There is an excellent book by Nassim Taleb that expands on this theme titled "Fooled By Randomness".
As well as the annoyances you point out, there are also the people who haven't a clue but decide to weigh in with their half-baked opinion anyway.

This seems especially prevalent on the Apple forums. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen some poor sod advised by some 'know nothing know-all' that the answer to his/her problem is to "reinstall MacOS" when their issue could easily be solved in seconds by deleting a corrupt preference file, or fixing an incorrect permission.
Rust has std::Result<>, concise operators that comprehend that type, and various popular Result<> wrapper libraries that make the simple cases concise and pleasant to deal with. I love Rust error handling; it is among the best features of the language.

BUT! When dealing with nontrivial cases, particularly with asynchronous code, Result<> can get complicated. Not everything is Copy. Sometimes you have to type erase errors. That chore tends to be a bit of a hairball, as the many StackOverflow cries for help will attest. Other Result<> hairballs exist as well. For one thing it's a bit anemic in the 'original cause' department and sometimes you need to elaborate on it to capture more information about failures.

Coping with these cases is most comfortably done after you've nailed down your intentions and shown yourself that your code and whatever mass of dependencies you're reusing work as intended. Later, when dealing with the failures you papered over with .unwrap() you might end up doing some refactoring. At that point, however, you are confident that your effort will ultimately work.

The brilliance of .unwrap() is that your technical debt is visible. You can spot it in the dark, as can everyone else. In my mind that's a killer feature of Rust. I can't make you write good code, but at least I stand a chance of spotting it when you don't.
This post seems light on any actual data between the difference on individuals who have a CS masters and not, and instead argues against getting one on a few aux points:

* Opportunity cost

* two tweets of HM saying they don't find it useful

* cs masters aren't geared towards non-cs college grad students

* professors don't know how to handle online teaching

* programs are cash cows (mentioning two non-top-cs programs)

To address the core point about whether those with a masters from a top CS program (say top 20) vs self-taught _on average_ do know more about programming, in my experience they do! Topics like how programs work (interpreted vs compiled languages, memory management), how a program talks to the OS and underlying hardware, and even topics on AI/ML and how to do deep learning. Whether that makes them better at their job depends on what their role is - if it's making a web application or working on underlying infrastructure in C.

So I guess to provide an alternative view to the author's, there are good online programs like UT Austin and Georgia Tech where students don't have to take time off work as they can do it at night / weekends, both programs are low-cost (~$10k), and do have professors who do understand online teaching. I think it's important to make sure you pick colleges and classes geared towards learning, not go with the intention of specific "job training", and likely you'll come out ahead having done it.
I'd agree; you can't boil it down to just luck or just hard work. I think it a correct notion that fortune favors the prepared, and neither luck nor hard work on its own suffices.

If you look more closely, I believe that hard work, luck, nepotism and sociopathy all become apparent factors in successful business, with their levels being able to be exchanged to some degree (with some having a greater amount of variability, depending on variation of the others).

In the end: you are right; a bar of gold can fall onto a dead body, but he's no better for it.
The Workshop You Didn't Know You Needed with Free Bonus
Red, yellow, blue buttons.

I worked with VisualWorks (nee Objectworks) for many years, and red/yellow/blue button events were still in the low level user input processing of code. They predated the semi-standardization of mouse buttons. I still have a strong synaptic response for them. My brain just automatically knows what kind of operations it will find for each of those colors.
> Maybe it's posted somewhere else where it got more views?

The videos on that channel definitely seem to be reuploads. Not only are they not in chronological order, but they have an upload date of 2020, despite the original crowdfunding campaign (for season 1) promising a DVD release in 2012.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jeffnewman/living-with-...
I do not understand how “what did you do in this nice weather” or “what game did you play” is any different than “how are you”. They are all conversational, they all express an interest in your life.

“How are you” is a hell of a lot less superfluous in a work context than either of the alternatives you provide, especially than the gaming question.

If you’re in America, you’d best learn to use the conversational generics, or you’ll be going nowhere fast.
A Whistleblower’s Agony
No argument here, though while it may be a rounding error in overall energy (something I don’t know) the main uses I’m thinking of, planes and cargo ships, are pretty bad polluters which is a concern. And while pollution is my top concern, running out (or more realistically supply dropping and price skyrocketing) is a close second.

As in, I agree that all of this is a win but we could be forced into a very bad position if oil suddenly skyrockets in price due to scarcity (with no end in sight) and don’t have alternative, applicable energy storage options for things we depend on.
Maybe the moral of the story is to never allow yourself to wallow in self doubt because you don't measure up to any given success story. On the other hand, do allow yourself to use an inspiring success story to spur you into action when the time is right.

Maybe this is just moving the goal posts. After all, it seems to imply that there is some unknown mechanism at play that guides a person into a moment of opportunity. The question then becomes, "What is the nature of that process?" As far as that goes, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of it just comes down to dumb luck. However, to me that's more a reason to just take a deep breath once in a while and quit freaking out than to throw up my hands and declare, "It's all fate and I have no control!"

To put it another way, you can still take some general wisdom from advice about success (as opposed to failure). Just don't take it too seriously. Use it to give yourself a little mental space once in while but otherwise try not to burn too many calories pondering it.
Does this have something to do with the article?

I don’t recall any “magic thinking” in the explanation of precession in my introductory undergraduate physics text. Just Newton’s laws and vector cross-products.

“you are applying the lateral force to a different spot on the object at each time interval” : how is that applied when the force is gravity, applied to every point of the object at every time?
> bakfiets

Some electric ones I've seen cost as much as a used Nissan Leaf.

Don't get me wrong, I loved cycling in Netherlands, but bikes wont work unless there's also great options for public transport. I can't imagine taking 30 mile rides in this from suburbs in Los Angeles or going up mountains at -20C...
Yup, nailed it. Hugo with Congo theme (and a few minor layout tweaks). Hosted on cloudflare pages for free
Maybe affiliation comes from belief and not the other way around. Would you really expect someone this critical of the CDC and the Democratic approach to COVID to be politically aligned with the people pushing those policies?
Railroads were widely deployed without steel. Serious railroad deployment started in 1830 [1], using cast and wrought iron. Not until the 1880s was steel available at low cost. It's amazing how far they got with crappy materials.

> But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better.

A Bessemer converter is very simple. It's basically a big iron vessel lined with bricks and mounted on a pivot so it can be tilted and poured. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Inputs are mostly coal, iron ore, and limestone, along with compressed air and some additives, but making good steel from those is tricky. The person who got this right, after about 10,000 tries, was Robert Mushet, who is mostly forgotten.[2]

Could that have been done earlier? Maybe. Probably not before analytical chemistry. The detailed composition of the inputs has a huge influence on what you get out in steelmaking. Before Mushet, the output from steelmaking was kind of random and often bad.

(1830 was when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway started operation. This was when railroads got out of beta and started changing the world. Before then, it was mostly one-off mine-haulage systems and prototypes. The Liverpool and Manchester finally got it right. They had regular service with multiple steam locomotives of a common design, double track lines, stations, signals, timetables, and tickets. At last, a production-ready product. This is what allowed the Industrial Revolution to scale.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet
The phrase "doesn't seem as amazing as it did" is distracting in the context of videogames.

Almost every response is talking about how games graphics have gotten better, or whether gameplay has improved or gotten worse. That's not the subject.

The subject is the loss of innocence and wonder, and how the author misses being the person who could play a mediocre game like Gothic III and be entranced by it.

You can put practically any videogame in front of a kid and they'll play it for hours and add to the story.

I wandered around the world of Ultima VIII for months. This was a terrible game if you play it straight.

But if you used the hackmover cheat you could move any item in the world anywhere you wanted, like an early 2-D version of the Sims or Minecraft. You could take parts of other people's houses and build yourself a castle. It was a game construction set. You could put poisons in an NPC's inventory and they might drink it.

I was in love with the weird mushrooms and the eerie music and the plot that didn't make a bit of sense. I was cheating so hard that every NPC was just a strange person I was visiting for a bit, with scattered bits of scripting firing off events I didn't understand. It seemed like an unlimited open-world playground.

I'm not that person anymore. I can't enjoy a bad game that way. I have nostalgia for the version of me who could love that terrible, terrible game, and for the lost half-imagined better version of that game that I'd filled into the gaps.

I feel like there's a world where Ultima 8 had better management and everybody remembers it fondly, and that I don't live in that world.
It will be so cool, if eventually we could deploy telescopes on other plants, like in Ad Astra.
For some evidence proving Martin Weigel right, see the BBC show Dragon's Den. Fix rich, self-righteous turds who think they are self-made billionaires bet on business ideas entrepreneurs pitch them. They never bet on the winners and frequently bet on losers. Literally millions of people could do the job better than them but where not lucky enough to get right. The best product ever pitched on the show was the Tangle Teezer which those business geniuses unanimously trashed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2O0SvrlFKA
This only works for non-sentinels. I.e. if "-1" happens to be the value indicating NoScore, I don't think the TS compiler can catch that?
Quite. I think Shark Tank is what we call Dragon's Den in the UK (bunch of civilians pitch to zillionares for cash and mentoring in return for a stake in the business - all on TV).

You see some absolute horrors that inevitably will lead to bankruptcy. However you also see some clever folk getting a well deserved leg up.

But I think we agree that for everyone that seems to effortlessly do the American Dream thing, there are 1000s or 100,000s that don't. Then there's the likes of me that have run a rather boring small business for 22 years turning over around £1.2M pa but not exactly setting the world on fire! I can sleep at night and have nearly no debt, so that's nice.
Related classic - How I won the lottery by Darius Kazemi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
> You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

So which great invention is just around the corner now?
With President Biden in Saudi Arabia
There’s a lot of negativity towards capitalism here in this thread which is hard for me to understand when the average Hacker News user is upper middle class chatting away on social media in the middle of a work day. It seems like capitalism has done exactly a great job in lifting people out of poverty and continues to do so.

A lot of the negativity simply comes from being detached from real problems, in my opinion.
(Without knowing the person at all), I would have asked, 'why?'. Lots of kids these days seem to be just following these paths blindly. A million dollars can be a means to something; it's not a goal.

'kids these days' - maybe this was always true, but it seems like they are trapped in a cycle of trauma, thinking life is a struggle to survive.
The physics of practical storage have been fully understood and well internalized in civil engineering for centuries: E = Fx. All that remains unclear is which forms will turn out to be cheapest at the time when they need to be built.

What is known now is that costs are falling even faster than did solar and wind, and are already of similar order.
> It does not replace the solver (you could not trust its results, contrary to a physics based numerical algorithm)

And I guess the outcome variable in the train set for the ML model was produced by the solver?
Yeah, I wonder, what the world would look like without destabilizing most of South America and Middle East.
I'm mostly writing "high quality production code" - and for logic errors which can't be gracefully handled I find little to no difference between .unwrap() and .expect(). What I'm usually mostly concerned about is understanding where the error happens if the application crashes, and a stack trace is the best way to obtain this information - not the actual text message. From a crash report and a stack trace it's usually clear what happened, and I think using either a custom panic! call or except would only be helpful if more information about the current state of the program would be helpful to debug the issue (like "expected value to be between 127 and 255, but not 1234").

For errors that can be gracefully handled - sure, using ? is definitely preferred to any kind of panicking.
You can skip the first two sections of this rant entirely if you don't care about his life story or his opinions on the creative process, by the way. The product review starts over 900 words into it, in the third section. I have no reason to doubt this man is paid by the word, I bet his grocery list has an ISBN label.
> even when people are being paid little attention is given to preparing for transitions, people quitting, people retiring, and so on.

I was looking at some contract jobs that seemed to be examples of a manager outsourcing the problem of finding a replacement that will somehow take responsibility while probably no longer having any access to the skills to interview them.. So in corporations there's a kind of eventual consistency if the replacement is actually essential.
Success is something that tends to be propogated when being communicated to the masses, but success is such a general word. Success isn't a one size fits all. It can be as simple as passing a test in school, graduating said school, paying off your mortgage/debt.

Success comes in all shapes and sizes.
We've never actually measured the speed of light in one direction. It's impossible.

Vertasium video on the subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
Might not be it but maybe Samy Kamkar is who you are looking for? https://samy.pl/
Yes it is.

I just redirect the other way round, so those ever rarer individuals typing in domains are also served fine on my websites. And also to automatically grab the https.

I just find it's ever slightly more "honest" to have the server name I mention, also be the one that's actually being served. -- And that's also because I'm quite annoyed at URL shorteners and all kinds of redirect trickery having being weaponized over the years.

So I optimize for honesty and facilitate convenience.

But this pretty subtle stuff and I'm not advocating anymore. -- I don't think it's that big of a deal either way and I'm just expressing my little personal vote and priorities on the big Internet. :-)

So my post wasn't intended to change your mind, but more as a bit of an alternative view and what made me get there.