skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of MIT, ~15 years ago. For dorm rush, when incoming freshman walk around campus and decide where they want to live, undergrads at my dorm, East Campus, would build out some neat, full-size wooden roller coasters. I never personally rode one, but I was always super impressed by them! They weren't quite as intense as the photos in the article here, but were still pretty big and seemed to get to a decent speed.

That said, looking back now, I'm kind of shocked the administration let them get away with it! I wonder if anything is still going on like that now? Sadly, I kind of doubt it would even be allowed, for liability reasons. But I also wonder if East Campus even kept up with it otherwise. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would have been instituted by someone or some group of people (some kids on Second West, IIRC) because some people are just like that, which could then maybe keep up by cultural inertia for a time once the founders move on, but which would ultimately stop on its own.
Immutable code is a poor replacement for trust in a company.
It shifts the trust from the company as it is now to the same company (and their capabilities) sometimes in the past. Preferably the company is operated completely anonymously.

It seems like the crypto community would do anything to avoid the legal/regulatory system and it's established processes of operation requirements, insurance and liabilities.

Doing that they regularly fail at performing the most basics of basic financial duties like not getting hacked and not throwing the keys to the kingdom.

I've yet to hear of a bank loosing funds and getting away with telling "tough luck" to their customers, but we've witnessed many crypto "banks" doing just that.
There is artistry in the vision and artistry in the execution. Execution without vision is likely to result in something quite banal (though any given person can derive their own meaning from any creation), but vision without execution is but a dream.
* [...] unified execution engine

* accelerating data management systems

* [...] streamlining their development

* [...] consolidate and unify data management systems

Can someone translate this to English? I can see and recognize the individual meanings of the words, but I don't understand what they're trying to say.
It just means you cannot use email validation as a way to limit one account per person. A person could just have another email on another provider anyway.

It's part of the reason why you see many places ask for your phone number, not that I agree with that, and even this method has many flaws.
SBX Robotics (YC W21) Is Hiring Techincal Artists in Toronto [Remote]
I have tried and failed to comprehend Haskell for my own uses. Certainly most of the examples in this article are meaningless gibberish to my smooth, practical brain. So kudos to those who grok the underlying math and find it a useful language.

That said, I am a fan of lazy evaluation in the right circumstances, and often find myself implementing lazy data structures (particularly in my Ruby programs).

Ultimately, though, I’m confused by this article which seems to be all about removing laziness from Haskell in ways that seem entirely counter to what I take to be its purpose. If you have to bend over backwards and rewrite your code in awkward ways to get the language to behave the way you want, maybe the project itself isn’t right for the language? It’s one thing to hack around a couple of isolated space issues in a larger context, but if you are enabling language extensions across the board by default to prefer eager evaluation, why are you using Haskell at all?
I think that would meet the definition of a "knowledgeable individual". Python does GC under the hood and most folks who use it extensively never see it at all. The wrong answer would be "what is garbage collection" or "its excellent, better that C++"
Ahhh, yeah grid demand response appliances are kinda common here (solar inverters and air conditioners). There’s been a few trials and whatnot of smart chargers installed in homes by grid operators:

https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/origin-energy-electric-v...

And a grid operator has been experimenting with special tariffs that are “free” during peak solar times:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/networks-test-time-of-use-appeti...

You’re right - it wouldn’t surprise me if there becomes a standard for EV chargers in Australia that makes it so they have to be centrally controlled to protect the grid/take advantage of excess renewables. Good to do it now before too many homes install EV chargers (probably only 30-40,000 in the country right now).
The hidden assumption here is that things go well if and only if (you think) you understand all the factors that influence your metrics, can do experiments and are prepared to use fancy statistics.

Which I reckon is a bit iffy. Special relativity was thought out well before any experiments to test it were feasible, and if understanding everything that influences your metric is a prerequisite then you can blame all failures on insufficient understanding without having any way of knowing when you have enough understanding.
When are we going to admit that DeFi is a regression, not progress, versus the status quo financial system?

Crypto is all about disintermediation. But that doesn't work when people's money / savings are on the line.

So we can easily tell exactly where this leads: Once enough pain has been sustained through errors like this, DeFi code bugs, fraudulent transfers, etc... a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will (a) become an intermediary in crypto/DeFi transactions to ensure that fraud, errors, etc are prevented; (b) introduce mechanisms to revert transactions (controlled by said HUMANS); (c) perform the massive paperwork on compliance (KYC, register big transaction, check against blacklists, etc)

Is there really a different outcome?

Crypto fans claim finance is an overbloated industry and they are here to disrupt it. In reality all they are doing is recreating exactly the same system but with one more layer of indirection (instead of transferring dollars you transfer a stablecoin that points to a dollar).

Will there be exciting use cases for crypto at the edges? maybe. Will it 'disrupt' the broader financial system, in the sense that it will make it better/faster/cheaper? I don't see it.
The devil is indeed in the details when one sets out to use memory in this Fortran-esque fashion.
But France has been on metric for a long time.
I wouldn't assume that all AI creates is devoid of any meaning. The meaning can be there, copied off the source material is the same way it copies brushes, themes and other features.
You can’t sell shovels in a gold rush unless people think you’re a prospector.
"recapture the traction"? It is used by literally billions of devices of varying form factors every day. It has probably 100x the number of users as Gecko/Mozilla Firefox and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet sponsoring development, and I don't see Apple betting on Gecko or another fork of Chrome anytime soon.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but are you saying they should hold back their own chips so as to make it fair for the competition?
Interesting to see how Databricks reacts to this given that they have their own Project Lightspeed (replacing the Spark execution engine).
It is true that ideals have decayed. US government did not retaliate strongly enough against the Tienanmen Square massacre back in 1989. Trade was much more important. Now US is critical of all the surveillance and other repressive things that the Chinese government does. But they missed the bus more than 20 years ago.

To take the story to its origin, President Nixon's presiding over the opening to China back in 1972 effectively killed the Tibetan resistance movement. As part of signalling their good intentions, the US withdrew all support to the Tibetan resistance movement from one day to the next. All the Tibetan freedom fighters fled overnight to India.

Now governments and media talk about human rights in Tibet. The opportunity to do something about it was lost long back.

Read 'The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong' by the Dalai Lama's older brother.
The increase in remote jobs, remote interviewing, automated interviewing, and use of AI systems for interviewing is directly correlated with people gaming the system. There really is very little good substitute for in-person interviewing. Or at least if you are committed to a fully remote experience, then you'll have to accept a greater likelihood of fraud, deception, and misbehavior as part of the tradeoff between in-person and remote and manage those expectations.
If you have an MS office suite the power query editor can expand JSON to columns. Doesn't result in a table that is normalized per se, but it is quite a powerful tool overall. Not really a Microsoft fan, but what they provide here is not bad at all.
"In common usage scenarios, Velox takes a fully optimized query plan as input and performs the described computation. Considering Velox does not provide a SQL parser, a dataframe layer, or a query optimizer, it is usually not meant to be used directly by end-users; rather, it is mostly used by developers integrating and optimizing their compute engines."

So the way you use it is that you describe some computation over your data as a query plan, and you implement a dataframe layer so Velox knows how to retrieve data from your database, and then Velox will efficiently execute the query plan? But it doesn't even optimize, so the problem it solves is that these systems like Spark and Presto don't efficiently execute optimized queries?

This world is very far removed from me, does anyone have a concrete example of how Velox might help them? Why is Velox better than both Presto worker and Spark engine. Aren't those core components of the system?
I've carried water occasionally in the past - aside from hiking trips my grandfather built a summer house without running water.

I would prefer to have clean rather than just running water, since the latter is useless when contaminated.

There's a stream close to where my grandfather built the house. We never used water from there because it was too rich in iron, even though it's more accessible since you don't have to pull the bucket out like in a well.
I read through the policy but didn’t see anything about my rights as a California citizen. Do you honor CCPA data deletion requests?
I was about to write that in case of Bezos with Amazon, the customer was simpler and the answer was to just pour money into it until you substituted the market, but I realise now that that is not that simple. It seems simple because we have hindsight.

My main idea though is that it is very hard to foresee what the customer will want after you deliver the product. Not what the customers want now, because sometimes they don't understand it until they experience it, and that makes me think that there is a LOT of luck at play here and a good deal of continency in prototype product design. Experience alone could be overrated. Think Kodak, I don't think they didn't have experience in product design, that they didn't understand their customers. I think they only didn't risk their luck and didn't think about what their customers would want in the future. And that is always a gamble.

- Things are more nuanced and complex than I am putting it here, but bottom line is that I am trying to tap into survivors bias.
What do you mean that they went too far? James and Peirce were not describing "reality" (in this discussion anyway. [1][2]) but rather were instrumentalists and thus saw every theory as having a purpose. That's the whole point of the squirrel argument. It not just "depends on what you mean" (as per analytic and some medieval philosophy) but also depends on what you're trying to do (which in turn depends on what you want/like.) In any case, the similarity I was pointing out is just that theories have purposes and ignoring this is a blatant blunder.

1. James even endorsed religion and other make-believe if it was useful to your purposes.

2. Peirce: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."
Yourself --- and at basically zero cost.

It's fairly easy to validate TOTP codes on the server side. It's just a SHA hashing function. See RFC 6238. I wrote my own but I'm sure source code is out there somewhere.

Free/open source client side apps are readily available for iOS and Android.

The only problem left is how to share the random/secret key/seed that your web site will generate for each user. This can be done relatively error free using email or on-screen using QR Code at the time the user enables 2FA.

Don't know how to generate a QR code? No problem --- lots of generators are available for free on the web. Just embed a proper link to generate one.
quite. it is very frustrating seeing _every single thread_ about israel turn into hateful rhetoric, spreading lies and propaganda, using buzzwords they heard somewhere, and generally not understanding history at all. but threads about china/KSA/UAE/etc. are free of this. this isn't whataboutism, its important to care about humans rights issues in multiple countries, but its just weird how hate-fueled people get about israel.

That is the one thing I dont get. I keep seeing people say that people cannot criticize israel, but that is _all_ I see in the media and in online forums. _every single pro-israel point_ here is downvoted.

it isn't antisemetic to criticize israel but yikes do people really get passionate about their hatred for it specifically, more so than any other country. antisemitism isn't antizionism but people really do end up parroting the exact same talking points as antisemitism. it really concerns me about HN honestly. at a point people really need to look within themselves and ask are they actually antisemitic?
Thank you! I did wonder why it was such a good quality image from the 70s. He was a famous smoker though of course.

More recently, Dimitar Berbatov was a known regular smoker. Also Jack Grealish but I think that's just when he's out drinking.
It's not founded on archaic religious belief. Israel is a major ally of the U.S. They are integral part of any foreign policy the US embraces.
Are you saying the decayed Palestinian leadership justifies their peoples abuse?
One word: smuggling.
The 25% of Russia where people live is in Europe.
The contradiction is that you can't talk about what you worked on, and you need to be careful that what you write in public research doesn't reveal it. It's ten times worse than the corporate equivalent.
Doing so is one of the guidelines here:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Along with this one:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

They are all honestly pretty great: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show HN: Try the pre-release version of Steampunk Spotter
Germany’s ultra-cheap train ticket saved 1.8M tons of CO2
The issue is that it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem. It's true that a good argument logically supported by data is better than a good argument that hasn't been checked against data. But the existence of data in the argument doesn't help you determine whether it's a good argument logically supported by data, or a well-crafted rationalization speciously supported by data.
Why not?

https://itigic.com/minix-the-hidden-operating-system-in-inte...
I like the image.

However, it looks like an oil painting, but I think it's a print stretched on canvas like you see in coffee shops. So it's a digital creation.

Whilst not any less of a way to create art. I like classical mediums, including photography (not digital). I think the physical human work of making the art is an important part of what makes something art. I don't discount digital art at all. I just like the older mediums. Anyway, that's just my opinion and I think making nice pictures is a good enough reason to do anything. The creation is the point.

Anyway, good for the owner of the AI who created it?
By the time you are reading statements like this on HN or Reddit or wherever people in whatever industry is being discussed already know that people who don't know how to evaluate the product are looking at that signal thereby making it useless as a signal.
The belief that more rational beliefs are possible is not exactly debatable, is it? Certainly, the “woo” stuff you referenced is not the only alternative? That people have to believe in some “religion” and that common “religions” at the current point in history are at peak possible rationality… well, there’s no real reason to believe that, is there?
My experience has often been feeling that something wasn't right and trying to fix it at a low level - variable or function names, length of lines and expressions, organizations in files, things like that. Often I would clean up things superficially but the feeling that something is wrong remains.

Sometimes I come up back after years, having learnt how to organize certain kinds of programs better, and can instantly see that the problem was much deeper than that. I now think that as a rule of thumb, if it is hard to make a piece of code tidy at a superficial level, there is a deeper underlying issue. If I manage to find a good architecture, I try to keep the bad code as minimal as possible instead of investing more time in a dead end.
Agree, even though many consider coding is a craftsmanship, it's not supposed to be seen as art
There is a lot of diversity between churches so I'm not surprised you did not see this while others did. I grew up in the in a Pentecostal cult in the 90s and very much covered revelations, second coming/endtimes, Israel as part of the sermons and randomly speaking in tongues - the best I can describe it is batshit insane (we are talking computer chips as the mark of the beast in the future, single currency, russia as the beast out of the sea, nuclear war coming, lots of death and beheading) However my grandfather in a northeast baptist church which I occasionally went to was very tame and I never saw any of this. Had I exclusively gone to the baptist church I may very well have stuck around in the church.
Seems far-fetched to assume that this thesis applies to product development just the same?

The impact a data-driven mindset can have on the organization cannot be understated ('RIP intrinsic motivation' section). I've seen it first-hand, both data being used as cop-out for bad leadership, meaningless 'successes' used as trading cards for promotions, and design experts having a decade of experience overridden by shaky statistical analysis, or worse, non-inferiority tests.

Meanwhile, the shortcomings in the product that everyone knows are rarely addressed because they are 'difficult to test'.
Haha, same here. There was some problem that required careful handling of locking. Did it easily in SQL, they were not convinced at all
The hosting company views are completely irrelevant once they receive a legal order to stop hosting something.
I like that errors can be quantified as it removes some doom ambiguity from mistakes.

The first company I worked for sold access to data on a per minute basis and it was like $1.50/minute or something (dialup access in the 90s to an interactive ClarionDB session).

So any outage would be quantified by some curious programmer. I remember even small outages being quantified in hot washes as 10 minutes x 2000 users x $1.5 = $30k outage.

I remember one of my bosses was nicknamed “Commander Crash” as he once crashed the whole system for hours based on a single live config file edit.

No one was fired but it was actually liberating knowing how much mistakes cost.
Haha, I count this as a very good parallelism, as I had close connection to construction workers.
Seweage pipelining can be done by multiple ways. There are ones which will clog in shorter or longer time. There are ones which made up by more parts than really needed. And there are perfectly goods which also obey all standards.
Will the third one write a blog as "how to great plumbing"? Or just will say: "I know plumbing"?
Why did US break "official" relationship with Taiwan? They must agreed with China for that. Now I can see it does not agree with China.
Yes, if you want to know if two addresses refer to the same account, you need to keep up with the actual rules for each provider that you decide to care about.

But, if you're using the email as a username just for convenience, you get to decide what rules you have for username comparison. You can absolutely decide that A@gmail.com and a@gmail.com are different accounts for your service, even though emails you send to these accounts will likely reach the same inbox. You can also decide that they are the same account, but that haşim@gmail.com, HAŞIM@gmail.com and HAŞİM@gmail.com are all different accounts. It's entirely up to you to know what is important for your users.
I assume fabrication refers to semiconductor fabs, not factories assembling computers together. None of the world's most advanced semiconductor fabs are in China, and whether they can catch up to TSMC/Samsung remains to be seen.
Accepting that people make mistakes is one thing, but reducing those mistakes is another.

If it’s a simple change, why not do it? Though, I can see your point if the change is monumental but barely reduces rate of mistakes.
> a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will (a) become an intermediary in crypto/DeFi transactions to ensure that fraud, errors, etc are prevented; (b) introduce mechanisms to revert transactions (controlled by said HUMANS); (c) perform the massive paperwork on compliance (KIC, register big transaction, check against blacklists, etc)

When they do that they'll realize they no longer get any benefit from the underlying asset being a cryptocurrency (since it is no longer trustless as the humans are able to reverse transactions) and will switch back to a trust-based system with a good old database as the ledger.
Intelligence Authorization '23 – Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena
Microsoft (at least used to) require account passwords to not include the part before @ in email addresses. My email address was a@(domain).net, and therefore I was prevented from using any password including the letter "a".
The kind of discrimination I am talking about is refusing to hire fat people for desk jobs (or not promoting them, or paying them less) because of stereotypes that they are lazy or lack self-discipline or simple distaste for the way they look. [1]

Categorizing a patient as overweight or obese is not discrimination. Dismissing their health concerns or providing lower-quality care because they are fat is. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853419/

[2] https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/weight-bias-hea...
This feels closely related to an observation I made a long time ago.

<<<For the most part different skills are rewarded in different fields, but skill in marketing is practically always rewarded. Therefore, we end up in a world dominated by marketers.>>>

Replace "marketing" with more general arts of persuasion, and you get OP's thesis. Rhetorical skill (which is completely orthogonal to other qualities like honesty or sound judgment) is often the surest route to success, across all fields. It's the "ace in the hole" that beats all other cards. People with the gift of gab usually win the race to get their project approved before others, often contrary to objective merit. They get more promotions, likewise. They gain political power. Our lives are influenced more by persuaders than by makers (and BTW social media only make it worse). I detest this fact, but don't feel I can deny it.
Kotlin and Scala are the most popular I’m seeing in my current field (finance).