skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes the classical response of "it doesn't happen"/"no one says that", mind you someone will come argue that exact point in the next conversation I have on the topic, like the ten previous conversations I've had on the topic.
> Sequential spinny disk access is faster than SSD random access.

It is, but on both kind of drives you'll want to dispatch at least a couple of requests at once to get better performance. In the memory-mapped case, that means using multiple threads.

In addition, you might also want to call madvise(MADV_RANDOM) on the mapping.
Still though, most of those people come to the gulf countries voluntarily. Not that it justifies the abuse, however I presume they are still escaping an environment that's not much better. Or at least the meager allows them to escape it to some degree. What else would expect that new people keep coming to those states?

So it seems a bit better than slavery, more like wage slavery many immigrants to North America faced during the 19th century. Of course the migrants workers in Saudi Arabia and gulf states are certainly aware that they will never will be integrated into the local society unlike the European immigrants.
Hot take, mathematics should be split into arithmetic and mathematics.

Most people just want arithmetic, what's the tip on this bar tab? What do I put in the capital gains box on this tax return?

Universities, businessess and most who will go into other STEM paths want mathematics.

And mathematics is incredibly abstract and the reward are plenty of it's your thing.

I haven't read any recent research on this (cause I'm not much interested) but there is potent correlation between IQ and interest/ability in mathematics (and physics). This is telling (or concerning depending on your viewpoint) as IQ is a normal distribution meaning actually statistically some people are unlikely to grasp or be interested in the maths we care about.

TL;DR You wont understand why quadratics are so important until you encounter integral calculus. You wont appreciate complex numbers until you encounter complex analysis (well maybe some physics).

The same way you wouldn't appreciate cement until you encountered a brick wall.
Paywalled, but CATL already make 1/3rd of all EV batteries, including some to Tesla. Tesla's main supplier, Panasonic only supplies 9% of global demand so the framing of this as a threat to Tesla is weird.

The US willingly gave up any chance to lead on this tech (and several related areas) to China, to slightly prolong their hydrocarbon industry. An obviously bad decision for multiple reasons.
Still waiting for the moment when somebody uses image/video AI for some real nasty incident in world politics.
Writing this in Perl will have significantly different results. Can’t speak for Go but text processing in Python is slow.
I think westerners just love to say "Sharia law" without any understanding what that actually means, as a Saudi who followed closely our recent reforms, Saudi Arabia is moving in a big way from Sharia law to a more western/international common/civil law, where's the Sharia law only remains in marriages/inheritance and many parts of that are being reformed and codified under the new legal status law.
There is a tool that makes Linux act as if it has Mac keybindings. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto I've been using it, with some custom config, and it's made life a lot easier as I use a Mac and Linux laptop at the same time.
Sign the open letter about the right to install any software on any device
Which dovetails with the way Charles V operated. Completely unlike egotist leaders who insist on doing things themselves, Charles V was fabulously rich, knew the power of money, and contracted everything out to the most talented people he could find. Even his grand strategies were contracted out to accomplished strategists. And he didn't attach himself to any particular idea or move. At one point he messed up and a force of his numbering around 20k was destroyed. In public at least he simply shrugged it off and went back to planning world domination. His history is full of fascinating tales of the machinations of imperial power.
> Sequential spinny disk access is faster than SSD random access.

No it’s not. At least not with modern SSDs or NVMe storage.

Even at 100 MB/s, a spinning disk in sequential mode is doing 100 x 1024 / 4 = 25,600 IOPS (assuming a standard 4K per operation).

Even consumer grade NVMe hardware gets 5-10x of that for random workloads.
Thanks ! (Hardly qualifies as "drama" though...)
I’ve only dabbled with CL/SLIME, but Cider seems to me to be a very close analog (and is similarly very useful).
> I tried an experiment where I memory mapped a large file and started updating bytes at random. I could get the rate down to kilobytes/sec.

Memory-mapped IO means you're only giving the SSD one request to work on at a time, because a thread can only page fault on one page at a time. An SSD can only reach its peak random IO throughput if you give it lots of requests to work on in parallel. Additionally, your test was probably doing small writes with all volatile caching disallowed, forcing the (presumably consumer rather than enterprise) SSD to perform read-modify-write cycles not just of the 4kB virtual memory pages the OS works with, but also the larger native flash memory page size (commonly 16kB). If you'd been testing only read performance, or permitted a normal degree of write caching, you would have seen far higher performance.
I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported. Merely an assertion of opinion, not a even really a fleshed-out essay.

Here’s the real shit, scariest thing I’ve ever read:

The Erosion of Deep Literacy, Adam Garfinkle, National Affairs, 2020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662
Ask HN: Is This Typical Procrastination?
Too much of my day looks like this:

I sit down in front of the computer to do some work. I think:

"Before I begin, let's check HN real quick if there is something interesting on the frontpage. Probably there is not, so I'll start my work in a minute."

Half an hour later, I realize I went down some interesting rabbit hole of information or joined a discussion.

Now I need a break from the computer. I stand up and do some other stuff.

20 minutes later, I come back to the computer to do some work. I think: "Before I begin, let's check HN real quick ..."

What is this problem called? Is it typical procrastination?
> I haven’t shown an optimized Python version because it’s hard to optimize Python much further! (I got the time down from 8.4 to 7.5 seconds). It’s as fast as it is because the core operations are happening in C code – that’s why it so often doesn’t matter that “Python is slow”.

An obvious optimization would be to utilize all available CPU cores by using the MapReduce pattern with multiple threads.

I believe that'd be necessary for a fair conclusion anyway, as you can't claim that I/O isn't the bottleneck, without utilizing all of the available CPU and memory resources.
You probably won't read this, but when I saw that movie, my mother who was really not too different from the mother in that film, she had died some years before from some other but overall similar disease.

I had been laughing my head off until that point, but when his mother says, "I didn't want to be any bother," I started crying and just cried and cried through that whole scene you describe.

So I really feel for you. Have a virtual hug.

I have watched the film a couple of times since though. Once you know it's coming, it's just a pang.
Similar to SLIME, there is Cider (https://docs.cider.mx/cider/index.html) for Emacs.

There are a lot of debugging and data visualization tools for the repl with features I haven't found in Common Lisp like :

- https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger (which I'm actively working on)

- https://github.com/djblue/portal
SLIME was used in the early days of Clojure but is long sinced replaced by Cider (also emacs) or other impressive tooling, i.e. add-ons for IntelliJ (like Cursive). I would say there is nothing that SLIME offers that was not replicated or improved upon in Clojure's tooling.
While you're right to a degree this relationship is still beneficial to those laborers in Asia at least to some level. Due to western investment their living conditions generally have improved quite significantly to what it was in the past.

Just look at China now and 30-40 years ago. Especially when you compare it to countries which didn't become manufacturing hubs like India and some other others in the region (and especially Africa).
Todays large hard drives are over 250MBs in sequential operations
> doesn't pumping large volumes of liquids into the earth like this lead to all sorts of unintended consequences as well?

Is it better to have the large voids that were created when oïl was extracted?
This will have absolutely zero impact.

Everybody knows you must use Microsoft products and if those don't comply with regulations, the regulations will have to change...
Stable Diffusion: removed NSFW images from training dataset
At this points, isn't it pretty safe to assume very few Silicon Valley services conform to GDPR?

Another example was shared recently: Shopify is technically illegal in Germany [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561222
Computer controlled soldering demo [video]
>(And you have to install the pixels library :-P)

I knew someone would say this: it doesn't tell you that, does it? It's supposed to be an introductory reference work, so surely "how to install the 3rd party package required by our hello world example" should be included?

And anyway, even after I installed pixels the code still didn't run right.

I honestly found it insulting that such an expensive book would have such obvious oversights. It's like nobody proofread it at all.
I think it's good that the author made it as accessible as possible, but had to pause after a few chapters because they took so long to explain the basics (I was always bad at uni-level math but still studied half a math bachelor before CS).

Do you think it's a good approach to skip to chapter 8+, and come back to the first ones if we're missing something? Or do these first chapters still bring something to people with math education?
I don't believe it would start ww3, Russia's military isn't capable enough for that. And I do not believe they would use a nuke, especial against NATO troops on the ground. If you believe Russian doctrine, which they've quoted several times, they would only use nukes if Russia itself is under existential threat. Not that I do believe that, but do you think those who can authorise a nuke really want to end the world and die over not getting to change the government of Ukraine?
And what would be the alternative? LibreOffice with its 90s UI/UX?
Capturing the moment is more than just pointing.
Look, I know the argument you're making, and it's certainly something to ponder on.
But the whole "writing prompt" thing has a different aim from "human-created" art. Whatever that means. But it's generally a small subset from the latter.
> Scales to terabytes of data and hundreds of billions of keys per store

> Efficiently handles thousands of concurrent operations

> Dramatically improves throughput, latency, write-amplification, and read-amplification versus common alternatives for many workloads

> Optionally combines multiple classes of solid-state storage to optimize performance and endurance

It would be nice to see some evidence/benchmarks supporting these statements. Perhaps I missed something but I haven't been able to find any on their page or github.
Having dealt with several data parsers I would like to somehow estimate how much electricity is burned globally just for lazy implementations. E.g. in .NET non-devirtualized `Stream.ReadByte` is often one of the hottest methods in a profiler. It and related methods could easily be responsible for double-digit share of CPU when processing data. I mean, it's not IO but just pure overheads that disappear with custom buffering where reading a single byte is as cheap as it should be.
I have a guess that insulation is important in Kenya too.
The title I/O is _no longer_ the bottleneck seems to suggest disk speed has caught up, while in reality the slowness is due to poor implementation (slow Python or Go with lots of allocations).

The real problem to me is that languages are too high-level and hiding temporary allocations too much. If you had to write this in C, you would naturally avoid unnecessary allocations, cause alloc / free in the hot loop looks bad.

Presumably soon enough it's very unlikely you find any new word (actually it's 10 passes over the same text) and most keys exist in the hashmap, so it would be doing a lookup and incrementing a counter, which should not require allocations.

Edit: OK, I've ran OP's optimize C-version [1] and indeed, it only hits 270MB/s. So, OP's point remains valid. Perf tells me that 23% of all cache refs are misses, so I wonder if it can be optimized to group counters of common words together.

[1] https://benhoyt.com/writings/count-words/
If you think taxes are a punishment for success in life, I assume you support toll roads, pay for your snow removal from city street and rent your police and fire protection? Or are you only concerned about the impact on your success not anybody else’s?
This is a "not as bad as" fallacy.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

TOTP is phishable and the secrets to unlimited codes live in plaintext on both the client and the server. Endpoint malware, phishing, and database dumps are some of the biggest threats online and TOTP offers no strong defense to any of these. In some ways TOTP is even worse than SMS as it is possible to manipulate timestamps to get a code valid in the future. SMS and TOTP both are garbage in terms of both security and UX. Their use should be discontinued ASAP.

Webauthn solves for these problems, and everyone has devices that support it already. It is negligent at this point for web service providers to not mandate webauthn and discontinue both SMS and TOTP.
Let's not confuse tax evasion with proper high art, alright?
Heat and/or humidity gradient? Or how does relative humidity play into this?
Indeed - for that particular problem a big cost is the "IO" from main memory "into the CPU cache". Ben is careful to qualify it as "disk" IO, but even this is somewhat vague. (as is "CPU cache" vs L3/L2/L1 - Ben's interview problem is highly L2 sensitive, I think, and increasing variety in that size will make results harder to interpret.)

On a modern gen4 NVMe, I routinely get 7 GiB/s. gen5 is supposed to double that (as soon as manufactures get "enough" money out of gen4 given PCIe4's extremely short life compared to gen3's extremely long one.)

There was a time not long ago (maybe still) where highly scaled up, many core (40+) Intel CPUs could not match that getting from DIMMs into L3 for just 1 core (as per his interview problem). So, we are indeed moving into an era where "IO" from the primary persistent device is indeed no worse than IO from DIMMs, at least in bandwidth terms. DIMMs still have much better latency and the latency-BW ambiguity has been observed elsethread.

EDIT: I should clarify, to connect my text with your comment, that the real cost of (1-core, uncontended) allocation is also more "populating/mapping the cache" with copies, not just "allocation" in itself.
That’s one way to do it!

For a public project you would only want the builds to be propagated out to other developers once the changes had been approved and then merged into a branch that triggers the CI.
True. And main memory access can easily become slower than SSD sequential access if you do random byte accesses and your working set is larger than the CPU's caches or TLBs.
I took a fair number of uni math courses, and experienced a wide range - with many clearly passionate about (& very good at) teaching.

OTOH, that was [mumble] decades ago, and I've not heard much good about trends in university teaching since then.
This all happened because of a strange economic imbalance. Essentially zero interest rates made money basically free to the wealthy. Homes are a special commodity as everyone needs one and land use regulations limit quantity. Thoughtfully regulating land so there is always at least some available nearby for residential development can ease that pressure. Zero interest rates were never sustainable and have contributed to a global asset bubble that includes housing and various other economic sectors.

We don't need some special rules against investor home ownership. Simply maintaining reasonable fiscal and land use policies should be enough to restore a reasonable balance.
Nonsense. SWIFT is a Belgian corp. that provides inter-bank payments. It has nothing to do with the US or the US dollar.

There is no US-issued license required to use dollars internationally. This is stupid.
https://epi.dph.ncdhhs.gov/oee/a_z/genx.html

One is called GenX and Chemours (DuPont) has been poisoning the city of Wilmington.
I'll have you know that crypto astrologers exist.
You’re free to submit stories and say whatever you want. It should be pretty clear why nobody is talking about Twitter on a completely unrelated thread.
I wish I had ms office with its 90s UI/UX instead of whatever garbage it evolved into.
Sometimes "X is a language" is used to naturalize poor pedagogy or when knowledge is made to be hard to learn.
Math is a tool. Even if it's a language. Even a language itself is a tool.
You wouldn't learn to read klingon if you don't like Star Trek and you will never need it.

That is not an excuse to avoid good methods of learning.
It could lead to billions in fines for Microsoft. Up to 4% global revenue - for each EU country.
Presumably the empty housees in OP's neighborhood are not being rented.
Every time I write something I intend to be permanent I reread what I've written multiple times out loud. I find complicated sentences, or related phrases that are unnecessarily far apart, or words that I'd never use in speech. Then I make modifications to minimize these.

So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can only write well yourself if you assiduously read what you write.
We regularly discuss GDPR matters in our German company because there's a lot of FUD concerning the various cloud platforms and we have to cater to sensitive customers with our own hosting. One extreme is that you can't use AWS at all because of Schrems and it's a US compancy etc. On the other hand there's some hearsay about Microsoft (Azure) being tolerated because there's no way around it.
I agree - "IO bandwidth is no longer a BW bottleneck" would be a better title.
It's available to download at libreoffice.org
clojure.inspector is an interesting namespace, but in practice I haven't found it very useful.

- It is rare that this problem is the limiting factor. In Emacs, which has horrible problems rendering long lines, usually by the time I realise there is a visualisation problem my editor has died.

- There is a thin band between too-big-to-print and too-big-to-visualise where this tool is useful. Almost all practical data seems to fall outside this range.

That said, Clojure already has some good tools for solving this problem. Immutable data structures and good generic primitives that are easy to inspect make it fun to deal with inspecting objects.
Problem as always is, it's all talk and (almost) zero enforcement in Germany.

Complaints to a data protection official take forever, are usually dismissed at first, even if counter to published opinions or decisions such as TFA. And only if you still care after a few years of waiting and at least one appeal you might get a decision, however usually a very cheap one for the perpetrator.
I am looking for ways to "supplement" (or compensate ) for my sons math schooling - CPM looks interesting but if it is just solo study is it any more effective than the usual textbook and exercises ?
>The difference. We don't persist anything on the server side, it's totally in memory

Very nice. At what point are items deleted?
Obviously private data is up to the user, but what about privacy ie gdpr, and the general courtesy of deletion from your end?
Fascinating read, wasn't aware of this history of python. I thought the line about the fear of not having a copyright statement for ABC was interesting - and applies to many aspects of life in general where setting things free is the right thing to do but also scary.
Awesome! Wasn’t aware this recording existed. I became a Glass fan after watching Leviathan (2014) featuring Akhenaten.
Right. It seems like they set out to replace some misunderstood or outdated view of C++. They’ve clearly had success, but it’s no C++ successor.
Arguing SMS is better than TOTP is like arguing IE7 is better than IE6. Sure, but both are so far from being anywhere near a reasonable solution today I cannot understand why people make an argument like this seriously.

Everyone has a webauthn capable device, if not multiple, right now.

The only reason phishing is still a thing is because people keep implementing and defending phishable 2FA methods.
Anecdote: Back in the mid-80's, I talked to a Professor of Mathematics Education, from a university with a large Mathematics Education program. Her quick take - everyone in the field agreed that how we (Americans) teach mathematics stinks. Beyond that, there was nothing resembling agreement.
You can still use office365. It's just that the cloud-based M365 shouldn't be used.

TBH, i used to work at a bank (and now at an energy company), and anecdotal evidence i have is that no big business use M365 cloud services(2 for 2 now). At least not in the IT departement, even where we have people using access to mash .xlsx together and get actionnable data from it.

[edit] I must add that the bank used azure (as an AWS backup mostly), and still, we had no M365 product installed on our microsoft computer.

I'm not a hater or anything, i do have a FOSS bias, but i try to stick to the facts here.
Here is an interesting discussion about the relation to EXP and circuit complexity.
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/58201/why-is-p-np-implies...

A nice presentation by Wigderson may also help to see consequences of P=NP in a less rigorous phrasing ("'Creativity' can be efficiently automated [if P=NP]").
https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...
There is a more formal text as well:
https://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/W06/w06....

Another class of results that I find interesting are inapproximability results. Namely, for certain NP hard problems, it is impossible to have a polynomial algorithm that computes the right value (for all instances) within a certain approximation factor unless P=NP. In https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1132516.1132612 Zuckerman shows that approximating MAX-CLIQUE is hopeless unless P=NP.

This is of course just a mountain of evidence and not a proof. It does mean that there are potentially many ways in which one could prove P=NP without necessarily achieving anything practical. This is what I think Knuth means: you could have a non-constructive proof of P=NP or perhaps an algorithm with complexity n^10^10^10 that solves an NP-complete problem.
Isn’t California data privacy law more or less equivalent to GDPR? If Silicon Valley’s companies don’t conform to GDPR, I would expect them to face the same type of issues locally. That will maybe come in the future, GDPR is still fairly new, that type of stuff can take a long time to develop.
Well Churchill did have some authoritarian tendencies and believed it might be the optimal form of government in countries 'inferior' to Britain.