skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the dream! I think it won't work at most public companies unless you end up in a department with a dead-end product whose raison d'être is to keep one or two whale customers happy.

I have a friend who does migration tools that help businesses move their data from ancient versions of software that the big players don't support any more. It's a niche, but it's a niche that banking/insurance/etc customers are willing to pay for. I've applied for jobs like this and never even made it to the screening call. When I asked how she got the job, it was through a former colleague of hers. I actually interviewed with that colleague at a different company several years prior and I heard from her that his impression of me was that I would be bored in the role. So I think it's really important to emphasize to the hiring manager that it is exactly what you are looking for, especially if you have a background in more "hip" companies.

If the "boring" companies don't call you back, my recommendation would still be to look for B2B software, or an internal/tooling-focused team where your customers are your colleagues. It has to be on a product that is already profitable (or seen internally as valuable) so that you don't get pressured into adding new features or having the whole product killed from under you. Ideally a company that is not on the IPO track. There are some maintenance roles to be found in these "hip" companies, but they're rare, and I think you have to accept that you might only be able to fly under the radar for a year or two until an ambitious executive comes along who wants to reorg the department into a boondoggle production line.
A few weeks ago GitHub made a strong statement about code in repos not being viewed by humans, that was very liberating.

If OpenAI could offer similar privacy statements it would immediately be much more useful. E.g. if they simply add a 'private' option, I'd pay double or triple for it.

OpenAI's tools are incredibly good and so easy to use, it's just that I simply cannot use them for most the things I want to do with them because of the privacy considerations, and that sucks.

I suspect OpenAI value the insights they get from looking at the data more than they do the extra revenue they'd receive if they could ensure privacy.
It depends heavily on the use case, not org size. I consult for a ~70 people org that needs to process ~1M tokens per day. That costs $30K per day on OpenAI ChatGPT API. I'm sure this is not an extraordinary case.
I don't kind of agree with your statement, since I earlier implemented a 80-line dependent lambda calculus [1]. I think dependent types make type checking a bit more involved due to non-trivial type equality, but that's all about it.

[1] https://gist.github.com/Hirrolot/27e6b02a051df333811a23b97c3...
Versioning is fundamentally the communication of changes to users, and those changes are inherently semantic. Semantic versioning as a general idea is thus not different from versioning as usual---one or more numbers compared in the lexicographic order relative to importance. The actual version format is at best superficial and distros have done a good job to unify all different version formats.

The Semantic Versioning codification does attach specific semantics to major, minor and patch versions, but those semantics can't exist without the public API. So the codification itself is nothing more than a stipulation that there should be three major categories of changes. The codification would have been much more useful if it included specific rules for particular languages and contexts, and there are indeed some noble attempts. But they are hardly complete and users can't rely on that. For example Rust Cargo defines a relatively complete semver guideline [1], but it doesn't define whether changing the minimum version of Rust required (MSRV) is a breaking change or not. So a minor version upgrade may or may not increase MSRV and users have to consult the release note to find it out anyway. If users can't be entirely sure if the minor version is breaking or not for their purposes, is the entire stipulation worthy?

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/semver.html

> I rejected your claim library authors rarely define the public API.

I agree that they do think they define the public API, sometimes only in their minds, sometimes in a form of the public source code. But the source code is only a portion of the public API, and any major libraries have suffered from numerous mismatches between authors' and users' definitions of the public API. The public API in semantic versioning clearly means the latter, so my claim that library authors rarely define the public API (of the second sense) still holds. But I should have been more clear about two different notions of the public API---sorry for that.

> Hyrum's law makes semantic versioning imperfect but not useless.

The general idea, yes (you can still communicate that changes have happened). The codification, no (three-part versions are no longer useful).
Is there a go-to book (or other resource) for people that have essentially never touched excel?
I've gotten a long way in life never using Excel except to type things in cells for my idiot former company which used it as a word processor, which made me hate it with all my heart.

And yet I assume, based on the slavish devotion to it by others, that it is actually great if you know how to use it effectively. Aside from this video, where can I learn the foundations as quickly as possible so that I can do cool things with it?
At least 20 minutes, given that it's through a casino. With you probably carrying a backpack full of conference swag.

And that's from the front entrance -- not counting getting from one hotel to another.

I've gone to dozens of conferences in Las Vegas -- so much so that I know the name and location of the meeting rooms in many of the hotels. I can compare that to attending several dozen conferences elsewhere, from Hanover to San Francisco to Orlando to ohgeez so many other places. Las Vegas has benefits, but the travel issues cause me to ALWAYS stay at the conference hotel whenever possible.
> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy

Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?
At the lowest levels, yes, because people at that level destroy everything they touch.. and if they are above that level then they can decorate as they wish, rugs and furniture are a thing.
> Netflix's "you can't sign up through the app" is a prime example of this that immediately comes to mind but there are many more.

He said the app was “rejected” as in not allowed in the store.

> Do you really think it's fair that all competing services have to be 30% more expensive than Apple's own ones if they play by Apple's rules?

Well seeing that neither Netflix, Hey or Spotify allow in app purchases and don’t pay Apple 30%…

> There used to be lots of iOS apps that allowed streaming pirated music. Everyone, including Apple, was seemingly fine with that and never asked where the music came from

When has Apple ever allowed apps that focused on pirated music?

And Apple has been selling music on the iPhone since the day it was introduced - well to be pedantic, three months after it went in sale.

> But if you so insist, in a FREE market, app developers would offer two options: pay through Apple with their 30% tax, or pay directly without it.

And there is nothing stopping you from doing that. In fact, Spotify did that for awhile.
>Between 2000 and 2017, I consumed three laptops

This is the story I really want to hear wtf
The next time I need awk or sed, whatever I end up writing I’ll submit to chat gpt and ask it to rewrite it in perl so I can compare. I’m curious because so many people (well, enough people anyway) speak so highly of perl’s text processing capabilities. If it’s such a great tool, then I want to use it too.

Edit: one plus is that perl is as ubiquitous as awk and sed. It was there the whole time and I didn’t even realize it!
Moving the Evernote center of operations to Europe
Hopf Fibration (2021) [video]
Fellow amazonian here. I have been on both sides of away teams and I agree that it sucks for everyone involved. You explains how it looks as the host teams. It also sucks for the guest team.

* You have to work with an, at best, passive team, at worst, actively hostile team.
* You need to work against very tight deadlines and a lot of pressure in a codebase that you know nothing about, and need to ramp up in quickly.

* You spent weeks (months?) developing expertise in a system you will probably never work again.

It is a terrible idea, but to be honest I can't think of another way to deal with the problem that it is trying to solve (mismatch between agendas of different teams).
> I’m far from convinced that Threads will capture the conversation twitter

It really depends on what you're discussing and the tone you're looking for.

Threads is already discouraging the type of brawling, political discussions you get on Twitter.

But it's amazing if you're wanting to talk about entertainment, photography, sports etc as the tone is more fun and positive courtesy of all of the Instagram people and the assertive moderation.
Ethanol will soon be the primary output of corn (it arguably already is). The current breakdown in the United States as of 2022 is:

- 40% goes to ethanol production

- 40% goes to livestock feed

- rest is human consumption and misc industrial uses

Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...
Agree with the plainest-of-plain-text approach. For me, the more structured the note system, the less it is used. I have a simple script called `n` that operates on a `notes.txt` on my NAS. If given arguments, it appends a timestamp and the arguments (verbatim) to the notes file. This serves as a super quick way to jot something down or log an action (`n determined Krylon adheres best for project X`, `n timestamp placeholder for server X reboot`). Alternatively, calling it with no arguments appends a timestamp and opens vim in insert mode at the bottom of the file. Finally, I have an alias `nt` to open `less` at the bottom of the notes file, for quick review (`alias nt=less +G ~/share/notes.txt`).

The main script is:

~$ cat share/bin/n
#! /usr/bin/env bash
cd $HOME/share # or wherever you want to put your notes
echo >> notes.txt
echo -n '# ' >> notes.txt
date '+%a %d %b %Y %T %Z' | tr -d "\n" >> notes.txt
echo ' #' >> notes.txt
if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then
echo $@ >> notes.txt
tail notes.txt
else
vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt # or nano: nano -R +-1 notes.txt
fi

This script is accessible from all my personal machines as well as appropriate work machines. It works well enough. I've devised a small system of tags and keywords, but that part is not particularly interesting. I just put the keywords at the beginning of a line and search for them with /^thekeyword/.

More structured notes go into dokuwiki or just a LibreOffice file in the project folder.

All this is almost guaranteed to be readable in 20 years. The LibreOffice files may be at more risk, but at least there is more than one tool available to read them.
There were a lot of advertisements about " they call it pollution, we call it life" about 15-20 years ago, and I still see some billboards to that extent in PA, funded by groups like CEI:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=542535...
One example is when a user tries to upload a file to the system that is not allowed (permitted files are plainly listed), a large red error message appears that says "This file type is not allowed. Please upload one of the following:"

You would not believe the amount of tickets we get daily where people are confused as to why their file wasn't uploaded.

Automated bots clear a lot of this stuff up.
Aren't those absurd consulting fees determined by taking a small fee and dividing it by a very small number of nominal hours worked?
Why Does Oklahoma Have a Panhandle? [video]
I don't believe the original performs NbE. It _looks_ like NbE, but the composition of `eval` and `quote` will not give you beta-normal forms. `quote` explicitly wraps inferrable terms in `Inf`, while `eval` eliminates `Inf`.
At the time, before everything became Linux, all these tools and the shells used to glue them together were an incoherent mess. Was your glue sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, bash or something uncommon like zsh? Did your grep, awk and sed use the same regexp syntax as your text editor? Single letter command line options, all meaning something different to each tool. Dozens of domain specific languages (shells, awk, sed etc.) meant dozens to learn and keep in your head. And you needed it in your head, because finding the information you needed in the massive single document man file reference was a pain because hypertext links had not been invented yet (well, probably in Emacs, which was another tool like Perl that people used to avoid the command line nightmare).
You can change the arguments to from_llm() to point to a local model instead. Example here: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/MPT-7B-Instruct-GGML/discuss...
I'm curious how far you want to go with "you didn't build that". How about taking away the Beatles' success because they didn't make their own guitars? How about taking away gold medals from Olympic athletes? How about telling Picasso he didn't paint that? How about taking away the Oscars from actors because it was all other people? Maybe take away Hamilton's F1 World Championships?

Isn't the success of those people so unfair and undeserved?

If you paid a contractor to remodel your bathroom, and then sold your house for a higher price, is the contractor entitled to a piece of that action?
Python will lose marketshare/mindshare.

StackOverflow answers, side projects, fanboys
> why Algebra is required to understand basic stats

I don't understand how you can say this. Literally every statistical concept is defined via formula, and to manipulate formulas correctly (or even really understand the concept) you need basic algebra.

Going even further than that, if you have the most basic "business scenario word problem", like cells in excel that describe how many widgets are made per hour, how many are defective, the price of each one...etc. The skill that lets you combine them in a sensical way to figure out your profit or loss is literally algebra. It's used by everyone everywhere all the time. Algebra is a core skill we can't be skipping.

IMO if you don't teach stats, people are okay, they have an intuition about fractions and can reason from there. But not teaching basic algebra and putting them in the modern economy is like not teaching someone to read and putting them in a car on the road.
Render Unto the Machine
>> What killed it were the never ending eccentricities you ran into, endless foot guns, and of course Perl 6 never being delivered.

>> But it really was the weird shit that did it in.

The current state of Perl 5 for Python fans: ----

Perl 5: I'm not dead!

TIOBE: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead!

Internet: Yes he is.

Perl 5: I'm not!

TIOBE: 'E isn't?

Internet: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...

Perl 5: I'm getting better!

Internet: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.

TIOBE: I can't take 'im off like that! It's against regulations!

Perl 5: I don't want to go off the chart....

Internet: Oh, don't be such a baby.

TIOBE: I can't take 'im off....

Perl 5: I feel fine!

Internet: Well, do us a favor...

TIOBE: I can't!

Internet: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long...

TIOBE: No, gotta get to Reddit, they lost nine today.

Internet: Well, when's your next round?

TIOBE: Next year.

Perl 5: I think I'll go for a walk....

Internet: You're not fooling anyone, you know-- (to TIOBE) Look, isn't there something you can do...?

Perl 5: I feel happy! I feel happy!

----

But seriously, Perl is not dead yet.

It is usually installed by default on most Unix and Linux systems.

It also rides along with most MinGW-based toolkits like Git for Windows. If you do software development, there is a good chance you might have Perl installed and not even know it.

If you are on a Linux or Unix system try running 'perl --version' to see what version you have installed. I would be very surprised if it is not there.

Some people like to make fun of it despite its wide-spread use and utility. Most of them probably know little to nothing about Perl and have not written or maintained any Perl code. There is a good chance that they are using Perl code without knowing it.
A new neural machine code to program reservoir computers
Pinboard.in has been the perfect long term bookmark solution for me. It has simple tagging, the site is clean and easy to read, search is excellent. Have gladly paid year over year the 22 bucks for the full shebang.
> you think they are trying to feed you some bullshit

She was asking his personal political opinions. Her only indication that it was bullshit is that he didn't say what she wanted to hear, or rather, print. Selective skepticism.
Second hand knowledge. I have a friend who worked at one of the biggest botanical gardens in the United States.
It may be sacrilege to say this, but I have adopted Retool in my organization for the purposes of quick-and-dirty internal apps that are essentially thin GUIs around internal data stores. It has worked out well for us and even stodgy backend engineers like myself can be productive with it.
I feel like the facts are a little thin. It is not really true that "For decades, American math curriculum has followed a standard sequence: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus." That may have been the local condition in some places. The high school in my city does not have and has never had any named math course except calculus and statistics. Everything else is just "math". Common core math does not follow the given progression, either. 8th grade common core math has elements of algebra, geometry, and statistics and probability.
In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole.

The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.

Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.
Related:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hopf+fibration&tbm=isch

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hopf+fibration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration

Github: Hopf - A graphical program for exploring the Hopf fibration:

https://github.com/mwalczyk/hopf
Will Bluesky have ads and sell your user data?
No web support is likely a bot mitigation strategy
I think we are actually mostly in agreement there then.

Perl was invented because the gap from shell to more capable languages was (and is) really big. Languages like Python and Ruby didn’t exist yet, and Perl had a really, really strong sweet spot in text processing.
It's the same process as code review. It is code review.
Ok cool thanks!
How is data science not just statistics, rebranded?

When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science?

Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers, now we do more Bayesian stats, on bigger computers, and therefore call it data science?
Did yours read any assigned novels in school in the 4th grade? Ours didn't, they don't do that anymore.

Not much writing either, because so much is online.

My wife is homeschooling next year.
Good question, and it probably depends on what you read. Here is one report that suggests there is a correlation, but I would continue to gather data:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...
eh, it's all ymmv.

i've clocked ~8 hours of media time with a T420s with an ultrabay battery and tlp/powertop reporting an average of 6-8w during the process. Regular battery + the extra ultrabay battery put the capacity up to about 7.7Ah; about the same range of battery capacity as a newish macbook pro.

a t420s is a very old core machine at this point. I would suspect the same conditions with a similar amount of battery with a modern processor could do a lot better; but i'm getting too old to sit in front of a screen for 8+ hours of media time, honestly -- and lately with USB-PD and power banks I have been skewing towards buying ultrabook style laptops and accessorizing via USB3 rather than with proprietary expansion slots.

I don't know what the media time on something like a laptop with an N100/linux + a powerbank, but I suspect it'd be quite a long time.

typo: meant 7.7aH
Evidence that climate change itself is occurring, but not of anything else.
I concluded that I really doubt she had been there after reading more into it. More than likely, she is just virtue signaling.
Perl is/was fantastic and awful. An excellent alternative to grep, awk, sed, ls, test.

A lot of the greatness of Perl came from writings of Larry Wall, Mark Jason Dominus, Randal Schwartz, Tom Christiansen. There is so much wisdom to be gained from all their code and documentation.
The argument against homeopathy (if there is one, I admit I have no interest in the subject and have no direct knowledge) is that there is significant contradictory evidence that shows there is no correlation between the treatment and the outcomes. It isn't: "I thought about it and don't see why it should work so I think it mustn't"

I would love, just once, for yet another commentator on the advertising practices of Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al to provide a shred of evidence for their baseless conjectures. But of course, there is no evidence. There is, in fact, no correlation based in fact or reality between homeopathy and the advertising practice of said companies. Just an attempt to use rhetoric to smear them based on personal agendas.

You can hate the companies and their practices. You can hate advertising in general. But I see no reason to doubt the effectiveness of the techniques on rational principles alone. I have no doubt that there is a clear signal in their data that shows their practices achieve outcomes aligned with the needs and desires of their customers: the advertisers. You don't understand why because you lack of access to the data and are therefore unable to independently see that signal with your own eyes. To conclude that the companies are stupid or deceitful based on your own lack of independent confirmation is a kind of hubris that is outstanding.
"How bad was the migration?"

"It didn't happen"
Joel: "Is there any risk of brain damage?"

Dr. Mierzwiak: "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss."

- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
My version of “dead” here means rarely used for new development. I relied on it for years, and even I finally gave up and do script level work in Python instead. Particularly because the many CPAN dependencies are aging and starting to rot from neglect.
I personally cannot stand subtitles. I wind up reading them and not seeing the video.
Can you cite a source for that?