skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's so funny how there is almost no 'science' - or 'engineering' - in modern 'computer science' or 'software engineering'"

It may not have been clear in 2014, but it is now: Data scientists are not computer scientists or software engineers. So tarring software engineers with data scientists practices is really a low blow. Not that we're perfect by any means, but that data point you're drawing a line through isn't even on the graph you're trying to draw.

I was unlucky enough to brush that world about a year ago. I am grateful I bounced off of it. It was surreal how much infrastructure data science has put into place just to deal with their mistake of choosing Python as their fundamental language. They're so excited about the frameworks being developed over years to do streaming of things that a "real" compiled language can either easily do on a single node, or could easily stream. They simply couldn't process the idea that I was not excited about porting all my code to their streaming platform because my code was already better than that platform. A constant battle with them assuming I just must not Get It and must just not understand how awesome their new platforms were, and me trying to explain how much of a downgrade it was for me.

"We don't have calculations for how to estimate, given X computing power, and Y system or algorithm, how much Z work it can do."

Yeah, we do, actually. I use this sort of stuff all the time. Anyone who works competently at scale does, it's a basic necessity for such things. Part of the mismatch I had with the data scientists was precisely that I had this information and not only did they not, they couldn't even process that it does exist and basically seemed to assume I must just be lying about my code's performance. It just won't take the form you expect. It's not textbooks. It can't be textbooks. But that's not the criterion of whether such data exists.
If you have seen it, Mordor is the closest thing in most people's mind that comes up.
I'm autistic, and quickly become very frustrated by distracting sounds and unexpected or unproductive interruptions. Unfortunately, this is a "me" problem, and I've found that I'm the only one interested in solving it.

After years of carefully managing/challenging expectations of me, here's what my work situation looks like today.

- I work 100% remotely. If I go into the office, I will only be interrupted constantly, dragged into meetings, etc.

- My Teams status is set to "offline" at all times, with notifications disabled. No exceptions. I check Teams messages between tasks, before/after lunch, and at the end of the work day.

- Unproductive Teams messages, like impromptu requests for status updates, questions which have well-documented answers, or that I've answered directly on multiple recent occasions, are completely ignored.

- All work requests which are not submitted via official channels are ignored. The remainder are addressed only if they are submitted, or assigned, directly by my manager. I completely ignore all other work requests.

- I've created dozens of mail rules to filter out almost all of the noise in my inbox, including the company newsletter, timesheet reminders, office-specific messages (bagels in the lunch room!?!), etc.

I know I'm a pain in the ass, but at least my sanity is stable after years of overwhelming frustration while trying to effect even the slightest change in others.
> Even something as insubstantial as "social transition" is still inherently medicalized as a matter of basic worldview

This redefines medicine to include literally all human activity, from sartorial preferences to how one crosses their legs. So sure, if we render this term meaningless we can apply it.
I'll never forget working at skateboard.com back in 2000 and watching éS: Menikmati and Slowly was the opening track. I didn't even care about the video, I just wanted to know what the music was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQnXa2rg58Y
However, the pricing is nowhere here (except a 'lifetime' thing pricing):

https://kagi.com/orion/orionplus.html

I'm not going to read all the material when I'm not interested in subscription based software anyway.
Independent, perhaps. Unbiased? Definitely not.

Since we're on the topic of newspapers, this old Yes Prime Minister quote explains the UK press quite accurately:

> Jim Hacker explains who reads the newspapers

> Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

> Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

> Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big **.
Although all data are automatically anonymized before sending to our server to be HIPPA compliant, we still would like to protect the user data security, also to save the computational resources. This is the reason to require registering an account. However, this service is completely free. We are partnering with IAEA and ITCP to make it available to any physicians and physiciats.
You just persist in failing to understand the issue

> I think I speak for basically the entire history of programming when I say that ugly solutions exist and are widely used throughout our profession.

I can raise it to the level of the entire history of humanity when I say that people yearn for cleanliness and beauty

> I never argued that this hack solves ugliness.

Sure, because "you choose to ignore [the problem of ugliness] as such". People who share "my opinion" don't ignore that and use cleaner formats, so YAML is a solution that addresses the problem, your suggestion doesn't
TOTP is a great concept, except for trying to obtain the hash algorithm and secret key associated with the QR-based registration so that one can equally sync it across multiple devices/laptops/cellphones/desktop-PCs.
Optional static typing. Always strongly typed.
Europe got syphilis from the old world
You can game with the AMD iGPUs. Especially if you are going for 1080p. AMD iGPUs are basically perfect for an under the TV console style gaming machine. Personally, I'm fine with 1080p on a TV.
What are the odds that extreme weather will lead to a global food shock?
The insurance giant Lloyd’s evaluated the risks in a recent study.
> their querty keyboards

Is this an unintentional misspelling, or an intentional one? That it’s italicized makes me think it’s an intentional reference or joke—if so, what is it?
In Graduate school I fasted for a week. It was deliberate as a cleansing activity for myself. Before this I had never really did any extensive fasting.

To directly answer your question, I didn’t talk to a doctor ahead of time, but I did make sure to drink lots of water during that period.

I remember the hardest day was day 2. For the first day, you “feel” hungry as your body is accustomed to eating, but it is day 2 you are genuinely hungry. However, per the article, after about the third day you simply don’t notice yourself being as hungry anymore.

I noticed then (and notice now when I fast) positive effects on mood, and ironically energy.

The only drawback I have noticed is that the first meal after a fast, especially if a large carbohydrate based one, seems to have outsized effects on drowsiness.
That song is a gem - deep in rotation back in the day. Never knew London Met did it. Grazie.
> Torvalds earns about 10 million per year

Source?
Most people don't take 30 years to pay off their mortgage, which is why mortgage rates tend to move with the 10 year treasury rather than say, the 30 year rate. The investors generally assume the average prepayment results in them being paid off in about 10 years, and since they're the ones the mortgage lender is offloading to, it's what your rate is determined by.

You buy a house, service the mortgage while you're there, then sell it (using the proceeds to pay off the mortgage), and if you've not made a bad investment, you come out with more money than you went in with, which presumably, you put toward a down payment on your next home. If you're downsizing, it may mean you're buying your next home outright, or with very little of the capital borrowed.

Unless, of course, your property value declines. Watch out for bubbles, and get sensible insurance to mitigate the risks.
Big Five personality traits (a.k.a. "OCEAN model")
While he was certainly targeting that kind of audience it is extremely shortsighted to think that it was Job's primary target. In fact, if you have enough knowledge about everything he has said and done, it's easy to argue that he was in fact targeting very competent peoples, that were quite knowledgeable about technology and that wanted shit to just work precisely for those reason.

Because when you know how things work and what they are capable of, the last thing you want to do is fight with them so that they work. At least, someone who doesn't know better cares much less because he is clueless about the existence of a better way.

Jobs was in the business of selling bicycles for the mind, not dumb consumption machines. The latter development of basic consumer focused products is just after the success of the iPhone and happened basically precisely when he left (while officially he was still managing apple, it's pretty clear that after the launch of the first iPad, jobs didn't have a lot of impact at Apple his health condition not allowing).

It also made sense because before Apple was something to exhibit to display wealth nobody that wasn't competent enough with technology would have spent so much money on it.
Which is exactly why current Apple offering is absolutely terrible for its price.

Most of the crap told on Apple nowadays are complete memes from the second wave of Apple cultist (most of them arriving with the iPhone) that completely ignore the true history of Apple and how it got to launch such successful products.
I wouldn't call any oil sweet but you do you.
Well commies also ordered killing sparrows and so maybe we should do opposite?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
Also related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

Network effects likely explain a big part of it. Many of the "popular" languages today aren't necessarily great languages and adopted for their technical merits. Often they were the only language available on an exclusive platform everyone wanted to develop software on. Other times it was because folks wanted to write a particular kind of application and there just happened to be this framework in this weird language that made the task easy.

We probably have more programming languages now than ever before but I think the market for new languages in the mainstream is relatively static. It shifts... but very slowly.
Directed evolution of enzymatic silicon-carbon bond cleavage in siloxanes
What is going on? Burn-in is understandable but “the content on my screen flickered” should not be a breaking edge case.
There’s also the “suckless” sta.li
>you might be tempted to 'yell' at your chatbot, but that won't actually get you any results.

Are you sure? Chatbots seem to give better results under “pressure”.
Without anything specific to the article, your comment is fishing for a point.
Is there actually anything special about 1.5°C specifically? Sure, if there's more warming it will be bad, and if there's less it will be less bad. But is there some magical threshold at 1.5 or is that just something people came up with because they thought it might be achievable?

It feels like we keep setting arbitrary limits/deadlines for ourselves and then people get demoralized when we miss those limits, and then we set a new limit and the cycle repeats. So like, I'm really not sure if continuing to push these specific goals in terms of PPM or °C or whatever is actually helping anything, or if it just makes people feel helpless and want to give up when it turns out that the current aspirational benchmark-of-the-day might not be met.
And the web is far more limited programming wise. As much as there’s experimental webgpu and whatever it’s pretty locked down.

Phones are with you constantly with GPS, movement, cameras, and microphones regularly accessible by apps, sometimes persistently. It’s also a platform handling SMS and Bluetooth and other weakly secure protocols.
> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning

The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank that dedicates all of his time to his hatred of reasonable responses to a disease.
No, but given two points in time, one can determine which are the center, left, and right views at each point, and see how much each group moved from those and at what direction.

That is, the center/left/right doesn't have to be an "absolute objectively defined concept".

That "what is center" can change over time is irrelevant. To see if people moved to the left or right compared to, say, the 90s, you just need to know what was the center baseline in the 90s. The comparison is relative.
Building a Next.js SDK using React Server Components
I believe Tesla's in serious trouble, but these blogposts where the seething hatred for Musk is palpable are hard to trust as reliable analysis.
> The Lisa line predated the Macintosh by one year, launching in 1983 for a pricey $9,995 (about $31,348 today, adjusted)

Imagine being one of the few customers of the Lisa, paying 10K USD for the best personal computer in the world, then the next year it's already deprecated.

> A curious tidbit: Lisas running MacWorks XL originally inspired the term "hackintosh."

I probably would have gone this route, to attempt changing horses mid-stream. Although, according to Wikipedia, the term "Hackintoshing" began as a result of Apple's 2005 transition to Intel's x86-64 processors. With the new ARM-based processors, I've heard this proud tradition of hacking the Macintosh is nearing its end.
immutable images
Every time I encounter LaTeX, I think of something I heard: "You shouldn't need a build environment for a word processor." I can't get away from that sentiment. Almost nobody I've seen using LaTeX has actually been using it for typesetting. Usually they're using a typesetter for word processing.

Sometimes it feels like they're only using LaTeX because they "learned it in college." You ever notice that? So many people in LaTeX threads say they learned it in college, or they've been using the same setting since college, or whatever. People learn LaTeX to make college papers look nice, and then they never need to configure it again? Isn't that strange?

The worst part, though, is that people complain if you call it latex. Which I think says quite a lot about it's userbase.
Yes, 90-day reporting makes no sense. I am also a 3 hr drive from my nearest immigration office, so a full day, ferry crossing, city traffic, with costs of car rental & gas.

There's no fee for the 90-day renewal, so no opportunity for expecting a bribe - unlike so many other aspects of Thai immigration, where chance of a bribe seems to guide policy, and obfuscation of those policies. So the 90-day renewal does not even enrich govt, or (more importantly :) its immi officers. It is just an unjustified nuisance to all participants.

And you need an exit visa if you plan to leave the country before the 90 days and then re-enter. Also unnecessary, because you will transit immigration at the border anyway - unless you are sailing out on your private yacht :)
What nobody ever talks about is that some of the old organic stuff (roots, leaves) in the thawing permafrost did not grow there in recent times because that stuff won't grow in permafrost. This means the thawing of the permafrost is not new and that the area used to have more stuff growing there than it does now. We should expect a greening of parts of Alaska if the warming continues and growth resumes.
It can be, but usually isn't. Similarly, dropping a feather and a bowling ball simultaneously might be science, or might not be. Did I make observations? Or am I just delivering some things to my friend at the bottom?
I know someone who was part of this layoff at Blizzard. His entire team of 200+ people were let go. He said he found out when he arrived at work and saw lots of people standing in front of the building not being able to swipe in. He tried his badge and it was denied so he turned around and went home. What a shit way to find out you've been laid off.
Storing data on a VHS tape was a thing in the early 1980s. I worked on an AlphaMicro "minicomputer" with this feature.

https://manualzz.com/doc/o/9paan/amos-system-commands-refere...
I just looked up the outbound laptop the other day. I saw one on an airplane when I was very young and I could not understand how there was a Mac that had this funny Kanagroo logo on it.

I know they had to pull the ROM from a Mac, I’m not sure what else went into the machine.
> However the caveat is that these performance metrics are based on pgbench (in the case of postgresql). That’s great if you have an OLTP system

Do we have good Postgres benchmarks for OLAP systems?
Why is that? He has been behaving terribly, I would be concerned about the ethics of anyone who doesn't hate him at this point.
"Never enter a pub with a flat roof" (UK)

Such pubs tend to be part of (run-down) housing estates (what might be called 'Projects' in the US), with attendant clientele.

It's a good rule of thumb if you are unfamiliar with an area!
It's a cultural perception issue, mainly.

In the west, when we see plastic, we think of litter. And we should, because there's way too many coffee cups, cigarette butts, and fast food wrappers lying on the ground in our towns and cities.

But in Japan people don't litter. So when they see plastic, it's associated with clean new products. The trash still ends up in the ocean, but they don't see it happen - out of sight out of mind.

The amount of overpackaging in that country is absolutely insane. But counterintuitively, they're going to have a hard time getting rid of it. Here, there's a decent amount of public consent for paper straws, biodegradable packaging materials, etc, thanks to the cultural guilt we have because we're surrounded by litter. Over there, people "do their part" by simply not littering - but that's not good enough.
The Optimal Choice of Hypothesis Is the Weakest, Not the Shortest
This recent paper provides one of two rigorous measures (with code) of machine intelligence that could be used to discipline discourse about "AGI". The other (with code) is a seminal paper by Shane Legg and Joel Veness "An Approximation of the Universal Intelligence Measure".
When we hire a few new people I start a new round of Coffee Chat Bingo.

My python script takes all our employee headshots and makes everybody a unique bingo card (obviously excluding their own headshot). Then they bring their bingo card to our virtual weekly Coffee Chats and get to mark off somebody else who is there.

First person to get a row wins a small prize (coffee gift card) and then we usually have a second place as well (submarine shape gets a sub sandwich gift card) — after that enthusiasm starts to fall off. Helps the new people to get to meet more people than they would if there wasn’t a gameified incentive.
There's a lot of subtleties. It's really easy to accidentally load test the wrong part of your web application due to differences in compression, cache hit ratios, http settings, etc.

Shameless self promotion but I wrote up a bunch of these issues in a post describing all the mistakes I have made so you can learn from them: https://shane.ai/posts/load-testing-tips/
PAL-M is Brazil as far as I know. Canada is still NTSC.
> 1. Fine-tuning OSS embedding models on your real-world query patterns

This is not as easy as you make it sound :)
Typically, the embeddings are multi-modal: the query string maps to a relevant document that I want to add as context to my prompt.
If i collect lots of new query strings, i need to know the ground truth "relevant document" it maps to. Then I can use the two-tower embedding model to learn the "correct" document/context for a query.

I have thought about this problem for LLMs that do function calling. And what you can do is collect query strings and the function calling results, and ask GPT-4 - "is this a 'good' answer?". GPT-4 can be a teacher model for collecting training data for my two-tower embedding model.

Reference:
https://www.hopsworks.ai/dictionary/two-tower-embedding-mode...
Just the anti-musk blog ecosystem is largely noise, this particular post looks pretty good though and mostly rings true to me.
Here's what my company experienced with lisp.

We had a small group (~20 devs all together) that decided they wanted to do a lot with clojure. So they started several projects throughout the company and, for the most part, they all very much enjoyed using clojure.

However, as those projects shifted into maintenance mode and that group moved on to greener pastures, we were left with a bunch of projects that were inscrutable. The big issue we ran into is that lisp LOVES to give programmers the ability to metaprogram and programmers love metaprogramming. However, when it comes to maintaining a metaprogrammed monster... that's basically just learning a new language used by nobody but this single project.

The end result was that people dreaded taking charge of lisp projects. They were hard to ramp up on. Hard to maintain. And they had really strange and hard to diagnose bugs. We've since spent the money rewriting most of the projects in java. I believe there are 2 that were simply too big and complex to do such rewrites against.

My takeaway is that lisp is much like perl. When you know what you are doing it can be a lot of fun, but heaven help the person that has to later read what you wrote.
This is engineered bacteria that produces an enzyme that can break man-made bonds between silicon and carbon that exist in widely used chemicals known as siloxanes, or silicones.

More man made chemicals can be made biodegradable.
Interesting, but what is the use case?

What is the advantage of using the croc C compiler instead of e.g. TCC?

I wasn't aware of Netsurf (https://www.netsurf-browser.org/); this is really amazing. But it seems to use Duktape as the JS engine, so performance might be an issue.
Not buying it. Tesla has a huge share of a growing pie. They will continue to grow as the EV market grows. While I agree that the past few months were not good, the long-term outlook for EVs is positive and therefore Tesla's outlook is positive.

Just because we have all decided we hate Elon Musk doesn't mean everything he has done is bad and destined to fail.
I was looking for a discussion of vitamin metabolism under fasting conditions (which seems important in terms of one's health) - not a word, even though it seems to be studied quite a bit - and the body appears to halt elimination of watrer-soluble vitamins under fasting conditions, so it's worth thinking about.

Most people fast because they want to lose weight, I imagine. Here's a good discussion, including of uncertainties and unknowns:

"The circulating metabolome of human starvation" (2018)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6141167/

> "Human starvation is marked by an early period of glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis (3, 4). By 2–3 days into a fast, fatty acids released from lipid stores become the primary source of fuel; this critical transition to lipid metabolism allows for protein sparing during prolonged periods of starvation (3). What are the hormonal signals that mediate this transition from glucose to lipid metabolism?"

I'd guess vitamin supplementation under fasting is a good idea if the goal is to get your body to start consuming its stores of lipid fats.