skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now you're trading off against the defence of Ukraine (for example). How many Ukrainian soldiers lives is this child's life worth?

I think a big problem is you don't currently realise just how many different worthy causes are currently underfunded. At a guess you could probably spend a couple of trillion a year in the UK before you've exhausted most of the nice things that could be done. There are sooooo many good things to do and only so many person hours (which is what money pays for mostly) to do them.

If you did scrap the defence budget then the money shouldn't go on treating these kids but instead should be invested in the surgery backlogs, ambulance wait times and the justice system trial backlog.
It really is effectively an advertisement for CUDA

100%. At a previous employer, we had some budget left after buying a new NVIDIA GPU machine, but not enough to buy another bunch of workstation/server-class cards. So we decided to buy an additional machine with two Radeon VII, which were quite affordable for the compute it provided. So, we wanted to try if that is a viable path for the future.

Unfortunately, ROCm was death by a thousand paper cuts. You could barely train any model without ROCm crashing with some memory order, weird performance regressions, or garbage output. The only thing we ever really got working was transformer training, with various ROCm libraries and PyTorch pinned to specific revisions and a bunch of patches. Luckily I had the foresight to encode all the dependencies with Nix and put all the Nix files in git, so we could reproduce this exact working version. We attempted to update the stack at various occasions, but it would always lead to more breakage.

Two colleagues meticulously reported bugs for issues that were encountered. But AMD did not really seem interested to try to fix these things (or were just severely understaffed).

After this experience I vowed to never buy AMD again for ML for at least a decade.
>> When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be.

Man, this. I was dealing with the same shit and just did what you did.

I stopped to show what I was doing in a low level, because he is a super technical guy and would try to find issues in things that don't matter and/or were not high priority.

And then I started to show and discuss only what matters. My mental health had a 100% improvement.
If this verbiage is only in the introduction, it will not carry much weight. People, and especially IT people like rules, that you can indiscriminately apply.
When you say to no attach to those thoughts, do you mean all of them? Cause I've felt detached with what's going on in my mind several times before, and they've been as unproductive as when I'm overwhelmed with thoughts, even if it is more peaceful.
A Critique of Realism – an excellent treatise on the topic
There's a typo on the first page. May have asked chat GPT as well as a human editor to autocorrect this document.
Getting completely changed after 4 years of life under influence of substances does not seem a perfect example…
> Can we simplify the domain instead?"

I can see this working in more mature and healthier orgs, but they’re a minority. As cynical as it sounds, most orgs are dysfunctional meat grinders where you’d get attacked for not having the skills to pull it off, in my experience.

Nobody brings this up for that reason and the madness continues unabated, ensuring the project becomes a slog over the medium/long term with the expectation that most will have moved on before it gets there.

This is also how we run our societies, leaving problems for later so that the next guy/president/generation has to deal with it at the point where it’s impossible to ignore anymore. Instead of much earlier when it requires much less effort and is reversible.
Facebook ran ads in Moldova for an oligarch sanctioned by the U.S.
The real constraint is indeed what that money buys, e.g the aforementioned person hours.

And if you print money and inflate then the price of goods rises. So sure, you might only pay a bit more for the treatment but now fruits are more expensive and your population gets slightly more unhealthy.
The re-writing of Roald Dahl
> The whole Mac idea was that there's no "uninstall process" with opaque windoze registries etc; what the Finder shows you is simple enough for an average user to understand. Like dragging an "Application" or a CD-ROM into the Trash to get rid of it. Of course they ruined all that with ~/Library/{Preferences,Application Whatever,Kitchen Sink}/.

The Windows registry is a simple key-value store, just like the macOS defaults system. Windows installers/uninstallers may create/remove some registry entries, but those are typically entries for file associations and the installed program list, and perhaps some global settings. But then the app is free to write its configuration data to any registry key it likes (usually ones named after the app), or to files in ~\AppData, or perhaps C:\ProgramData. It’s not much different to macOS in that regard. The uninstaller may offer to remove the stuff in AppData, or it might keep it as-is.

(~\AppData is a bit less messy than ~/Library, because there are only three folders in AppData where application folders could go, but Library has all these folders with various meanings.)
Read any book on the subject, they’ve done the research for you. The Phoenix Project, The State of DevOps Report.

Spend some time in companies that move slow vs fast and you’ll see the difference in their success first hand. You’ll see the metrics on their incidents and severity and customer satisfaction with them.

Oh, and the fact two companies mentioned (Google and Facebook) are two of the most successful companies on earth.
That doesn’t prevent you from accessing global variables or reading member variables (which many const functions do). Marking a member function as const doesn’t in anyway guarantee purity, and is actually quite unrelated.

In fact, most const class functions are by definition not pure at all, because they will read internal state, otherwise they wouldn’t even need to be members of the class. So I would be willing to argue that nearly all const class functions are impure.
> 2) Impulsive Force (mv-mu)/t - This is the reason you pullback the striking fist as quickly as possible. Note that the change in momentum due to the reversing of direction evaluates the numerator as (mv - (-mu)) = mv+mu along with the denominator t being made as small as possible thus resulting in a larger force. A good example is the game of Billiards/Carrom.

This reasoning would suggest that if you put two billiard balls next to each other and pull one of them away, conservation of momentum will result in the other rolling away in the opposite direction at the same speed. I've never seen that happen, and not just because I suck at billiards. When you pull the ball/your fist away, that changes the momentum of your body, not the other ball/your opponent's body that you're now no longer in contact with.
I haven't tried the ChatGPT feature on Leanpub. I just enabled it, looking into how to use it now.

However, I believe that most of the human written words needs to be preserved. At the moment, it's 100% human written.

Right after the first version, maybe it will contain more ChatGPT contents.
You can get private insurance in Europe too.
Interesting perspective.

Do you have more details regarding managing the flow of value?

Reading material or other resources that goes deeper into this?
In Europe, contracts generally specify a number of hours per week. For instance in Austria, my contract says 38.5h/week - this is what people usually think of here when they say "full time".

We have a time tracking system and overtime is either paid (not in my company, alas) or you can take it as free time.
I had a similar story though it sounds like I'm a little younger, so shift the dates up a bit and instead of CircleMud, Vampire Wars then Godwars II. Being a few years in the future, even our modest computer could play Starcraft etc, and yet I still gravitated towards MUDs. I still haven't experienced something like that again, something that felt somehow antique but also light years ahead of any other gaming experience I was having at the time. Sure, no sprites or models, but I could write descriptions for my spells. Combat was engaging and fun and you could get into ridiculous detail. The world felt enormous, I could actually get lost and have to scrutinize inputs and room descriptions to get my bearings. I remember feeling actual relief at one point reading the familiar room description of the fountain outside of town or something.

Oh, and I'm not really one for drama of any sort, but if I have to see drama in a gaming community I really prefer it to be between the programmers that make the game arguing in public chat about ripping off codebases etc.
The issue is, managers want these things, like a nice code base, but are unwilling to pay for it. Or more correctly you have to pay most of the cost of that Hodge podge of hacks. So while they can off load that cost to you, why would they make an effort to improve the situation?
In the same interview he also says that he's not fit to pass judgment on Rust even though he's used it.
right, but putting the && at the beginning of the next line makes it more obvious this is a continuation statement
The fact that there's a time=money=lives equivalency is kinda unintuitive at first glance, but when you think about it for a bit it will become obvious.
You will never have consensus on this. “Mainstream Science” May agree on something but then politicians won’t. The wide public won’t.

Humanity until recently didn’t think certain people (based on gender, race and ethnicity) were human. There still is no agreed upon definition of “should have rights to exist” and so this is simply not something that can ever be agreed upon.

Take same sex marriage. Many say marriage is a set of intangible beliefs and properties that simply can’t be reproduced unless it follows the dictum of man + woman. No amount of evidence will convince them otherwise :(

Take as another example evolution. People will still say “it’s just a theory”. So even if there is a solid, evidence backed theory of consciousness, it’s not going to be unanimous.
That's not the correct question.

The correct question is if homeless people sleeping on the concrete - would they want to live in that. And probably a good many of them wouldn't.
I'd like to read more, if you have sources.

But I doubt that mammalian herbivores ever had the potential to permanently deforest vast areas.

Few decades ago some farmers in africa lobbied for killing tens of thousands of elephants for their supposed destructive effects on vegetation. Since then we've learned that even with all thair trampling and gobbling their positive effects on flora outweight any perceived negatives.
Still waiting for the 'complete' and total collapse of Twitter that was falsely predicted and didn't happen, weeks after the layoffs. Twitter's 220M+ users still remaining on the platform unchallenged.
All those bools in the article should be const.
It's sad to see this go hopefully they will start a new one in the near future..posting this comment from Delta UTAH
vaguely kinda related.
I want to like lisp for its features but the syntax is too much for me to pick up without serious time investment, which I am not sure I want to make.

are there any other languages that support for example lisp-like interactive REPL, eg analyzing program state while it is running?
They can't do that because they would get sued for anti competitive practices by the creators of the third party app AppCleaner.
When people say software developers should unionize, this is why.
The title seems to have changed.

They found small benefits, possibly concentrated in areas with high segregation.
Last office job I had a chunk of my library at work, maybe $5k worth out of a $25k library. I ended up getting fired due to politics and of course wasn't allowed to collect my books personally. Had to play telephone over email to get them shipped to me, with a few gems missing that I still have to replace.

Still I'd do it all again because it stimulated our engineering team and led to some fun discussions.
> A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in.

I think this probably the most important concept for programmers to keep at the front of their minds when working day to day. So many of the problems I see come from developers (myself included) adding new business logic to a process, or fixing a bug and not thinking through the side effects of the change
True, functions with return values are so much better in such a case. I really miss if expressions and switch expressions in most languages. Most functional languages (and also c#) have them. Something like (let’s do JavaScript in this example):

const value = if (a) {
return true
} else {
return switch (b) {
case 1: return false
default: return undefined
}
}
> Most of us don't even live near an office. What will this accomplish?

you will be fired without being fired
Well imagine if you worked your way all the way up to Exec level and for the last few years all you could do was dress up in your expensive suites just to sit in front of a webcam. You’d also feel like a complete clown. You want people in the office so they can see you walking from meeting room to meeting room and hear the sound of your leather (not rubber) soled shoes as you traverse through the corridors of mere mortals. How else do you assert dominance? People need to _see_ that you’re important and that you matter.
For real. I thought I had already become a good typist chatting between commands in Starcraft but MUDs took it to another level.
> No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true.

Not every manager is like this.

Good managers will be able to evaluate their team members' actual abilities, and adjust their approach based on what is actually going on. As a manager, if you are able to hire experts who know how to successfully coordinate amongst themselves—and want to coordinate without sabotaging each other in some way, and are able to stay on-task, and prioritize things properly—then you can and should leave them alone to work, after pointing everyone in the right direction.

But who gets to decide if the people doing the work are really as good as they think they are? It's not just bad managers that delude themselves about their own abilities. Sometimes people need guidance or can benefit from guidance, but don't think they need it and are offended that you would even think they could benefit from it.

A lot of people you hear complaining about micromanagement fall into this category. Not everyone who resents being closely supervised can be successful without close supervision.

> The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.

Same here. I would wager, though, that the best co-workers and subordinates you've had also were those who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
Depends on what you mean.

Geoengineering can stop global warming if necessary, but bringing back a destroyed ecosystem is effectively impossible.
From what I got the context he more or less implied a compiler due to the language used (C++). I know that's now how C++ started but nowadays I think you can assume that when people discuss ways to program C++ it is by using a compiler rather than a code generator.
It seems odd to bring in Java applets and similar technologies to the discussion when the original point was that web development shouldn't need a build step. And isn't the whole point of SPAs to implement local interactivity? I.e. treat the client as a separate application (just like you would with an applet) and move session logic out of the server?

If anything, I think it's remarkable how far we've graduated from that point: many features components and features that we used to have to build by hand are now directly implemented in the browser; Javascript is significantly easier and nicer to use, even without having to apply a build step (even just splitting scripts into separate modules is now supported natively!); and features that previously required potentially insecure plugins to be enabled are now controlled by the browser, giving users much more ability to control what their browser is doing or not doing. Even if you do want more complex development with build steps, with tools like Parcel and Vite, that's usually pretty simple at this point (certainly simpler than the last few Java builds that I've seen).

It seems like you're complaining that everything is worse now because it's possible to have stupid amounts of complexity these days, but it's also a lot easier to have no complexity at all.
More details here https://pydantic.dev/announcement/
Amazon finally stopped growing exponentially and now the executives are desperate. A year from now, executives will say that they are going to mandate everyone return to the office for 5 days a week because random conversations in the hallway 5 days a week will help the company return to exponential growth again.
The most common refrains I hear about return-to-office are:

(a) employees moved away from the city during the pandemic for cheaper housing on the same salary and don’t want to pay a premium to move back;

(b) senior-ish engineers shirking their leadership responsibilities by claiming their role just requires them to focus on writing code all day;

(c) junior engineers underestimating how much social contact they need to learn on the job; and

(d) established employees failing to empathise with the new hires who have never met any of the team.
This isn’t advice that was given to me but something I wanted for myself that changed my life.

Advice: Figure out how to exercise for the sake of exercise

In the past I exercised for a weight loss goal. I’d reach the goal then stop exercising. I spent all of last year experimenting trying to figure out how to be like those people who run in -20C. I wanted to love some type of exercise so much I’d do it in -20C.

I’m now training for a marathon. I look forward to running and get excited about hill training (running up and down a hill at moderate exertion). I find running enjoyable and meditative.

The lessons I learned I apply to other areas of my life. For example, when my brain initially rejects something I know is good for me, I think “not today” and put on my running shoes (ie do the thing).
Well sure, if a student doesn't engage meaningfully with the essay and just writes a load of waffle to fill the word count, they won't learn as much and they'll get a bad mark.

In that case sure, the whole exercise is kind of a waste of time, but you could say that about basically any educational method surely? You can take a horse to water and all that...
I have no ideas about the complexity of the underlying CUDA/ROCm GPGPU, I am just using my card with CUDA a bit stupidly.

But why AMD do not setup a team of 5 good coders to have a good support of the well deployed/used frameworks in the happy path case? Later they can cover more cases but at least it would drive the adoption of their cards.
Adjust for Elon Time.

In general if Elon says it'll be done in two years time you can be confident it will take at least 3 years. Average of 4, but possibly more than 10
I’m nearly 7 years into hybrid/remote and am seeking opportunity to rejoin a proper collaborative working environment that’s physical, not virtual.

However, what’s right for me isn’t right for you and enforcing a rule one way or another does not work so I agree with your point.

Megacorps need to understand that we humans have a range of preferences and, if we’re to assume some prefer remote and some prefer office, then making a big decision as Amazon has will alienate a decent amount of workers. Cue calamity.
The "pretty much" does all the work here though.

It's not pure if you can modify the state of a global, the file system, the environment, the standard output, etc., and this is half of the reason why purity is desired.
In terms of applying this to languages other than C++, as someone who’s relatively new (4 years) to Java I expected to see a lot more side effects in the Java I’ve worked with in that time. In fact, the opposite has been true, and much of the points discussed in this article seems to have been adhered to; even going back to some of the older codebases. That said, we mainly have stateless microservices running on k8s, so naturally that leads to a very different mental model than long-lived stateful applications.

The thing that really strikes me from the article is the tone in which it’s couched. The pragmatism on display makes it so much easier to read than it could be. Coming from another few years writing Scala and thinking I was a functional programmer (writing hobby projects in Haskell, Elm etc.), I’ve realised I prefer programming in Java in a team (or at least my current workplace’s flavour of Java, and we’re on Java 17); a realisation that still surprises me now. In reality, there’s only so much purity needed to ship even a relatively complex microservice, and Java does that very well with some functional patterns thrown at it.
um, i seriously doubt that many const functions access global variables. if those in your code do, then i suggest your code has problems - the typical use of a const function is doing something like length() does on a std::string. how, or why. would such a function access a global variable?
> but rules are important, and this is what we're missing today.

Programming rules are important - they make you think before you break them. Just don't turn rules into dogma - otherwise your devs will be more concerned with following the rules than solving the actual business problems. And you don't want that.
> Training a model to identify poachers is A: way easier

Maybe, maybe not. What if the poachers do super difficult things like a) wear a cardboard box, or b) attach some twigs to themselves, or c) walk like a tree?

eg: https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-marines-use-cardboard-box-to-d...
Shape-shifting robot melts itself to escape lab jail
> I never thought the AI player had a 'deep understanding' of Go any more than I think string sort routines

It has a neural network trained on millions of games. Of course the model captures more than a sort routine which is non-parametric, in other words not trainable from data. The game of Go is complex enough that we can't code it up manually.

The fact that AI is implemented on matrix multiplication does not detract from it, humans are implemented in electro-chemical reactions. These reactions are all local, no single cell in our body has the big picture.

On the other hand, human understanding is also brittle - how many Go players still can't beat the AI even after this article has been posted? Blind spots/adversarial attacks exist in both humans and AI. It was AlphaGo that influenced the way Go is played at the top levels by introducing new strategies, techniques and moves that were previously considered unconventional or suboptimal by human players. AlphaGo found blind spots in our thinking first.
None. I'd continue interviewing.
My problem with emojis is finding them. No, I dont want to search hundrets of tiny images for making a point. No, I dont want to learn another alphabet with thousands of symbols. Just _write_ is so much easier. Or link it with a unicode name to be able to refer to it without searching
superficially it seems hybrid work cannot exist. Having an office where people are videoconferencing is madness. Fully remote is a stable equilibrium point, the sooner we adapt the better