skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [...] I'd prefer to just be given detail in a practical way rather than have detail broken down into practical chunks that loses the essence of the model.

I am not trying to come across overly critical here, but I think this is a flawed approach to learning.

My professional experience with EE is from working on circuit simulators. As in, I was a software engineer working on a SPICE simulator tool (it was actually mixed-signal, and some other stuff, SPICE was just part of it). There are a lot of transistor models out there. There's not some ideal model out there which is the best model and the other models are just simplifications of it. I think you may be underestimating how rich the field of modeling is, underestimating how complicated the more accurate models are, and overestimating how much insight you would get by playing around with the more sophisticated / accurate equations.

One problem with these more complicated models is that you have so many parameters and the parameters have effects that typically vary by orders of magnitude depending on the regime you are interested in. Another problem is that the complicated models may require the use of mathematical techniques that I simply don't have the time to deal with. Whereas if I look at the humble Shockley diode equation, I can instantly understand a couple good approximations about diodes:

- The current always flows,

- Every diode is a temperature sensor.

These insights are (for me) easy to figure out from the Shockley diode equation, and that makes the Shockley diode equation extremely valuable.

However, if I'm trying to understand the frequency response of a particular diode, this model doesn't have it, and I might switch from ODEs to PDEs. The diode has an electrical field which varies from one end of the diode to the other, and it has two different charge carriers, which are generated and recombine at different rates at different positions in the diode, have various drift currents, different amounts of momentum, etc. This provides the additional accuracy. Given this more accurate model,

- I'm not sure that I would be able to derive the Shockley equation at all, certainly not in a reasonable time frame, except for the fact that I already know the Shockley equation and could "work in both directions".

- I'm not sure I could get the simpler insights out of this more complicated model, at least in a reasonable time frame.

I'm the kind of student who never memorized formulas and always derived things from first principles on tests. It took me a bit longer, but I was happy to do it this way. It works well enough in some fields--very well in mathematics and statistics, somewhat well in physics, less well in electrical engineering. That's why I think it's a flawed approach to learning--it's an approach which I've personally relied too much upon, and met its limitations.

In order to get any work done at all when designing circuits or doing practical EE work, I must have multiple models in my toolbox, with varying levels of complexity.
Unix is/was a lot of things, it was developing at a much faster rate than VMS - was VMS better than V6/V7 certainly (I ported V6/V7 so that the kernel ran in VMS sup/user mode in place of DCL), better than V.2 (the VM subsystems were vaguely comparable) - file systems better than Linux's (there are so many, probably not in total, and that whole record based thing was just a straightjacket on so much).

The thing is you're comparing 1 VMS that didn't evolve much (it did get sort of cloned by MS) with effectively hundreds of Unix descendants.

As I said I've worked intimately with both, and I don't think VMS gets as much love as it's due, but in the long run I think it was a dead end largely because it was held close by a (great!) company that died
I guess I wish that the custom install were as easy as guix shell (and that it would also do sensible things like recompiling dependencies if you modified a library). But maybe it’s actually hard to do for reasons I haven’t thought about.
People are expected to mitigate flood risk by not moving to flood prone areas.
This is California bro, if you’re not rich - you’re a transient.

Somewhere along the lines it changed, and it doesn’t look like it’s going back unfortunately.
I’m surprised to see the highlights don’t include another common detail of the parsing algorithm that often trips people up: table rows and cells (tr/th/td) must be in one of thead/tbody/tfoot. If they’re not, they’re implicitly nested into a tbody. As in:

<table>
<!-- <tbody> -->
<tr>
<th>Column one</th>
<th>Column two</th>
</th>
<tr>
<td>Row one col one</td>
<td>Row one col two</td>
</th>
<!-- </tbody> -->
</table>

I’ve frequently seen it cause a variety of issues with VDOM libraries, and even plain DOM libraries with a notion of declarative templates, ranging from hydration mismatch logs (meh) to actual logic errors (corruption of the real DOM when nodes aren’t where they’re expected to be).

Other implied/omitted tags like body can cause similar issues too, but I think that’s become a far less common “mistake” (all of these are totally valid since at least HTML5) in recent years.
> The article says there is no criminal case and nobody went to prison. That's weird, right?

Ethically, morally, by common sense? Sure, weird. But it's also civil forfeiture law as it currently exists basically working "as intended." The whole goal is to end-run the criminal court and move things into civil court where they have a lower burden of proof and the accused have to pay for their own defense (or technically that of their property.)
The site is mainly freeware games.
Thankfully it wasn't a permanent situation; my dad eventually got a job managing a Rite-Aid actually in Sac, then got a job as a salesman for Valley Yellow Pages. This was enough for him to afford a modest house in Elk Grove; the neighborhood was kinda sketch given the proximity to South Sac (there were some... characters, to be sure), but it was pretty safe and decent all things considered, and I remember it fondly.

Unfortunately, between his health issues putting him on disability and the 2008 crash, that childhood home had to go. He had already moved to Yuba City with my stepmom and younger sisters (to be closer to her new job as an ultrasound tech), so it wasn't catastrophic, but it didn't seem like they quite recovered from that, nor did they really want to; my dad knew his days on this Earth were numbered, and rightfully cared more about enjoying the time he had left than fretting over trying to be a homeowner again.

But yes, while all things considered we were relatively fortunate, a lot of people I knew weren't - and still ain't - so lucky.
Success at work is warped by your co-workers’ salaries
Curse, press Esc and try again?
I have always thought this was weird, but for what it’s worth, it works the same way on the tablets (if it has a home button, swipe from the bottom, otherwise, swipe from the top right).
> I would suggest you do write something up, because there is a lot of myopia among the pro-crypto crowd about the real-world challenges of cross-border fund transfers.

Will do! I am confident I have the same misgivings but the base assumption here is that cross border fund transfers are hard, but crypto gives the system a chance to be rebuilt (with technology that's much more traceable, as well) -- without governments funding development and doing the political wrangling and horse trading to get on one system.

I'll try to lay this simpler thought out even simpler (for my own sake) -- If nation X and nation Y trust Coinbase, and have negotiated how to off ramp, and Coinbase satisfies KYC with both countries/participating institutions, we can theoretically do away with SWIFT + TARGET2 or VISA at the end of the day. What Coinbase as done is also not so unassailable (where as VISA very much is), so there will be many Coinbases, and this will drive prices down.

> There is often an enormous difference in the tech-savviness of people that send the money, relative to those who collect that money. Crypto assumes similar levels of knowledge between both parties, which is how you end up with people sending ETH to a BTC address, causing it to fall out of the money circulation entirely.

I agree -- I think this assumption of Crypto is optimistic and wrong. But, I also see this as opportunity -- this is a problem to be solved. Crypto needs people willing to do the hard work of building reliable, trustable, and reversible transactions, and essentially re-imagining what transactions, contract enforcement, and escrow look like without the threat of violence from one government in particular.

Maybe people shouldn't manage their own crypto wallets at all -- maybe they should be managed custodially -- that's an industry that needs to spring up. I know this is peak crypto-bull-speak but I assure you I am not a crypto bull (I literally do not hold any) -- but I can really imagine the recreation of the modern bank. An entity you trust to manage your crypto and help you make purchases/safeguard your money that takes drastically less fees than the modern bank. I could Trust and reputation becoming paramount, moreso because there is less recourse.
Obviously I would never write about a client, especially after I signed an NDA, therefore I've never written anything about Hertz and I never will (not that Hertz was ever a client). But I have written about my experience with a company that I prefer to call SuperRentalCorp:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-large-companies...
This is why I do not understand people being called software engineers when they're anything but. As you said engineer is more about ethics and liability. I am designing and developing software for more than 40 years but I would never call myself an engineer. Nor would I ever want to become one.

When it comes to the issues of safety the proper outcome should be organized by a processes, verification and other things that would not let that piece of code get into production. Putting this kind of load on software developer I think is utterly demented idea.
Facepager: Scrape public data from YouTube, Twitter and other websites
We already have a world class way to make software reliable without a mountain of bureaucracy: formal methods. As in using proof assistants to prove code correct. It is still too labour intensive for most applications but it is getting better every year. Making it illegal to not prove software correct when writing life critical software would accelerate adaption tremendously.
Is there a browser API that can list files in a directory?
Reddit ELI5: what is Calculus?
Cows work for free.
The key difference here is neither Apple nor your iPhone have your credit card data, only your bank does. That’s why your bank has to participate, they need some setup on their side.

Google stores your credit card data on their servers so it doesn’t have to be on your phone.
Only if you can pass their fraud detection! I tried signing up under various personal and business credit cards without any success!
>You can't eat any kind of service.

But it's possible to be in the vast network of services that people can not eat very well without.
If you are young enough, grease tastes good.
And IMO this is a problem to be solved. I am generally optimistic in the human race in that if there is a problem to be solved, and money/status/etc attached -- we'll solve it, given enough time.

Imagine how complicated computers, AI etc are -- is it that we just haven't gotten the same UI/UX visionaries to apply themselves to crypto yet?
Ah nice, thank you for sharing that. I hadn’t seen it before, and congrats on beating out Spark that hard, I hope it continues to improve!

As an aside, maybe it would make sense to publish a new blog post somewhere so that the top hit on Google for “DataFusion benchmark” isn’t that post I linked.
Hmmm I guess the national post would know something about getting things wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Iranian_sumptuary_law_hoa...
How do you want to decrease the benefit of committing crime or increase the benefit of not committing crime?

Without punishment, the benefit of stealing $1000 is roughly $1000.

Again, I'm not talking about crimes of desperation, I'm talking about "I want $shiny_expensive_thing and stealing it/stealing for it is going to be an easier way to get that than working for it".
Why? What does "not torturing animals" have to do with "eating healthy food", aside from "both are goods"?

One is an ethical position, and the other is self care, which aren't particularly correlated, except that both require self-control.
And the linked article, written in January, is out of date on that front. The timeline has finally been set and Whois is transitioning to RDAP for all new gTLDs next year.
How familiar are you with Lisps? I heard somewhere that it's easier for a complete beginner to start learning programming with lisps than with traditional languages. I started with more mainstream languages, but my experience tends to agree with that observation. The small set of various lisp forms and their semantics are easy to learn and reason about, compared to synatx and semantics of more traditional languages. Same when s-expressions are used for representing data. The syntax closely matches the logical structure of a program or data.

Keeping this in mind, I find the Guile scheme syntax used by Guix quite intuitive and pleasant. It reduces the cognitive overhead to configure the system, at least for me.
>I guess I wish that the custom install were as easy as guix shell (and that it would also do sensible things like recompiling dependencies if you modified a library).

The reason for the seemingly duplicate "foo" in the "--with-" options is that those "--with-" can apply to dependencies if you specify the right package there (so in the example, something else than "foo"--like something foo depends on). In that case it will recompile everything that needs recompiling.

> But maybe it’s actually hard to do for reasons I haven’t thought about.

It can easily be that we all made our own workarounds and so while it would be easy to add a nice frontend, nobody has a need.

So if you do think of a nice way, please try to do it.

For example we have some bias for emacs: inside emacs the guix development is very comfortable (we have and ship our own extensions for emacs). But that doesn't help you if you are not an emacs user.

The Guix package repo is a monorepo (see below)--all those packages have to work (and be tested) together.

From time to time I do think it would be nice to reduce barrier of entry by automating existing package editing inside a shell script we could ship:

if [ ! -d guix ]
then
git clone --depth=1 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git guix
else
(cd guix && git pull --rebase)
fi \
&& cd guix
&& guix shell -C -D guix -- ./bootstrap \
&& guix shell -C -D guix -- ./configure --localstatedir=/var --disable-daemon \
&& guix shell -C -D guix -- make -j5 \
&& ./pre-inst-env guix edit foo \
&& git add gnu/packages/*.scm

(the guix edit is NOT in the guix shell environment, therefore you have an editor)

... but so far it never makes it out of my head to an actual script shipped with guix :(

If we did make it--what would the package it would be in be called? Or should it be a subcommand of the "guix" command?

That said, if you want to make your own NEW packages, that's easy and well-supported. You can put a guix.scm whereever you like and lots of guix stuff will pick it up automatically.
Elon Musk is fabulously rich, so maybe there's something to this!
Also worth mentioning the HP Dev One, which is a collaboration with System76, and I think there's a similar collaboration with Razer.
In Firefox 105.0.1 on MacOS, the button also always fails when I click it.

EDIT:
In my case, it appears to be some extra "<div style=\"position: static !important;\"></div>" text added before the closing </body> tag. I suspect this is introduced by a plugin, probably LastPass.
A regular whopper is also vile, though.
I loved that so much. And it was enabled well after 9/11.
ETF popularity hits record number
There actually may be! Depending on what you’re trying to do and what’s inconsistent between your markup and the actual DOM. As noted in my earlier comment, implicit insertion/wrapping of certain elements can cause structural changes which lead to actual code errors or unexpected behavior.
I felt the same but after reading this[1] and following along with the REPL it finally started to click.

There are actually much less rules than "normal" programming languages. I had started to write my own basic functions that would be in a "standard library" (trim(), trunc(), remove() etc) and got the hang of it after a couple hours.

The only thing I don't like about the language for "serious" work on massive projects is missing static types (may make it less readable though..), and the tooling (most people lean on Emacs) could be better.

So I'm guessing there's some additional conventions for function naming, besides appending ? to the name for boolean return and ! for functions that mutate.

[1]https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html
Not necessary that the employee being let go is a low performer. Say you are a manager and get a budget cut. You have to let 4 people go. You might not have 4 low performers to cut. Large scale layoffs often involve letting go of good employees.
> I'd reword this as "I finally feel it has a solid use case", as the use case of "put western Union out of business for international same party money transfers" has been present since day one.

This is true, that was badly worded. Maybe something like "the few use cases that make sense to me have finally become guilt-free".

> You're just now understanding that it takes time for complex software systems to mature and reach their goals. Next time a novel system appears, this reframing of your mentality might help you to see the benefits earlier on and become an early adopter.

But I still don't necessarily want to be an early adopter in every piece of technology. I'm perfectly content to let people find the sharp edges and report back -- and either way up until now it was an absolute no for me with the environmental impact (knowing that PoS was possible) and rampant low-grade scams.
I learned the three finger trick recently. I’ve been shaking to undo this whole time.
Charted: 40 Years of Global Energy Production, by Country
Since 2016…. But I don’t think it’s profitable anymore
I actually like the way Apple is doing these things.
There is almost always a way to achieve the same things using established patterns, that takes slightly longer and is a little less convenient.
It's not like you can't use an iPhone without knowing about these little "shortcuts".
Admittedly, most users won't discover these hacks, because of poor discoverability.
They could add a ton of UI like dedicated buttons for all these hidden gestures, even label them to make it more obvious what they do. The downside is, that the UI would quickly become a complete mess.
Another way would be to have the user sit through a tedious tutorial upon opening the app for the first time and then remind them from time to time how to do things. This gets annoying really fast.
The real alternative Apple would choose however is to simply omit these little features and "streamline" their apps.
Because they aren't core the usability of the phone, I consider them welcome extras, which means I'm delighted every time I learn a new one rather than bummed out about the ones I don't know about.
Bill Gates says political polarization 'may bring it all to an end'
Is this of those AI generated things that doesn't actually exist, but fools everyone into publishing it?
From memory, the early versions of Docker were basically just combining LXC with an image implementation using overlayfs. They then switched to spinning up their own container processes directly.

Storage with LXC is just a block device, so you could roll your own using overlayfs. Probably a fair amount of work though. And in the other direction, I have used btrfs instead of overlayfs with Docker.
In general, SWE/SRE do not have access to user data. SWEs just have no prod access at all, and SREs generally only have the ability to run signed binaries with code that has been code reviewed and submitted, though there are obviously break glass features with auditing. Though I am not super familiar with them.

ML is where things tend to be a little bit more grey overall since being able to look at data is very useful for development, so some things are scrubbed for PII, but then accessible in some form. But for things like GMail or Photos, I would assume nobody (including ML engineers) can read your data as these are basically impossible to sanitize.

Some products have systems train ML models without engineers seeing the data, e.g. spam filtering, even when the underlying data is considered sensitive.
The only thing Silicon Valley produces now are

1. venture capital pyramid schemes,

2. adware privacy-invading nightmares,

3. the next "x" with "x" being some successful social network that they want to make even worse so it can be monetized more easily,

4. buildings in which executives and managers sit, controlling far-flung centers of innovation where actual work happens, and

5. whatever HP is vomiting out next quarter

Innovation has moved elsewhere.

You don't believe me. I know you don't.

The executives, sales, and marketing folks currently driving Intel into the ground are in Santa Clara. The engineers trying to save it are in Oregon, Colorado, and overseas.

Speaking of Intel much of the Zen microarchitecture was done at Austin, and Colorado, and India. Not silicon valley.

Of course, Apple is still there, somewhat. Getting someone on HN to say Apple is innovative would make my day!

People in Oregon, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, and elsewhere are building the future.

People in Silicon Valley are trying to figure out the best way to squeeze people in order to wring dollar bills out of them.
Before now I've explicitly reduced the size of my HTML docs (nothing critical/production facing, all passion projects) by removing certain HTML tags (e.g DOCTYPE, closing tags, etc) because I know modern browsers will still render them correctly.

This means there are miniscule savings from a bandwidth serving perspective. I wonder what the trade off is between the HTTP call and document parse/paint.

E.g is it correct to assume the browser will parse/paint the HTML content - fixing incorrectly closed tags on the fly faster than the few milliseconds more it would take to serve fixed-point HTML from the server?
> It doesn’t matter. When we talk about “having access to user data,” we’re talking about a humans being able to look at, i.e, the user logs of a former lover and doing something bad with it.

Google is one of the few companies known to have caught, fired, and officially publicly named an employee who did something like this:

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fir...

Most tech companies about which people don't routinely raise this type of concern have far weaker security controls against (and detection systems for) this threat model than Google does.

That said:

> But that’s not the real danger of Google having this data. The danger is in ML. Google’s entire business model is predicated upon using information about you to change your behavior, and to sell on the market predictions of your future behavior.

I'm of two minds of this. I'm not thrilled about how much data Google combines and unnecessarily insists on collecting in order to allow things like the Google Assistant and Google Maps to provide full functionality. At the same time, many of Google's assistance and search services are better than their competitors exactly for this reason. I primarily wish they were more transparent in this area with fewer dark patterns and more user control, with forcing users to pick between excessive data sharing and inadequate access to Google services.

Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, but not since early 2015. I certainly am not speaking for them here.