Hacker News Reader

The_Amp_Walruson Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1T Reckoning

At least computationally, central planning is quite hard

https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...

Author seems to be encouraging private donors, not governments. Given that, I don't see why we couldn't have both.

The_Amp_Walruson Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction

Great textbook, the exercises build up intuition, rather than just mechanically asking you to apply this formula then that formula.

The_Amp_Walruson Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

Olympic weightlifting is already split into relatively thin weight brackets. I think the issue is that, pound for pound, men tend to be stronger than women

In the 76-81kg womens bracket current record total (snatch + cnj) is 278kg. In the 73-81kg mens bracket the record total is 363kg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_weightlifting#Weight_c...

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

The_Amp_Walruson The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML

Writing HTML/CSS is one of the hardest and most frustrating things I've done as a programmer. It sucks. I would actively break my website to get the job done without losing my mind.

I would need to be very _motivated_ to change my behaviour.

I amended my comment to be less snarky I was coming on a bit to strong.

The_Amp_Walruson The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML

An article like this, comes up every few months. They tend to give an intro to the technical how-to but miss the step of convincing the readers that supporting screen readers is desirable.

Ok sure, it'd be _nice_ if blind people could navigate my website. But... how nice? How many screenreaders can I reasonably expect as a % of traffic? What difference will it make to their quality of life? What decision process should I use to decide if _my_ website needs to support this? Does my personal blog to support a screen reader? What about this bank login page? This motivating information is a cruicual step in actually getting people to care enough to do something different.

A contrasting example is the discourse on "bloated" webpages being slow and hard to use on shitty old phones. The upshot is that if your website needs to download and run 1MB of JavaScript then someone viewing it on a 5 year old low cost smartphone on a crappy 3G is going to have a bad time. The statistics around how many people have bad internet motivated me to try and reduce download sizes.

It would also be nice to have a guide on convincing your boss to give you time to support accessibility.

The technical details are good (and this article is quite readable) but probably aren't the key bottleneck in more people writing accessible markup.

The_Amp_Walruson Generating Coherent Noise Using Fourier Transforms

What's a situation where noise like this is useful? In any case it's very pretty and nice and I enjoyed the article.

The_Amp_Walruson What we lose when literary criticism ends

> just have each person's arbitrary "taste"

cocks gun

https://i.imgur.com/iRtrBOr.png

Always has been

The_Amp_Walruson Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)

I think the problem is that these academics literally do not understand or appreciate the benefits of having, say, a robust test suite with CI. Software development and DevOps is an alien culture and to be fair a good proportion of software developers themselves don't really get it. It's like a professional lumberjack who regularly sharpens their saw vs a forestry researcher who doesn't realise how slowly they're chopping down trees for samples because their saw is always blunt.

The_Amp_Walruson Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)

No. You'd be using pre-existing high-level tools for this purpose (in Python land this would be pandas, matplotlib, jupyter etc).

Not all software development should involve writing your own framework, and it's a bit of a trope that junior SWEs try to write DSLs and frameworks where they should just write some throwaway code. That said, if there's a common modelling or simulation method in your field and there's no great open source generic framework for it, then you should take a hard look at what you are all spending your time on (endlessly reimplementing the wheel).

The_Amp_Walruson Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)

Yes. Rewriting this stuff is much easier when you've already automated it the first time, vs scratching together instututional folklore on how to run a job.

The_Amp_Walruson Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)

As someone currently writing scientific programs for scientists, much of the culture of scientific programming is bad and they are having rings run around them by kids who build websites for a living and it's embarassing.

You think web developers are just writing programs for the hell of it? They have operational constraints around their work as well, it's just that there's a rad open online culture of continuous process improvement that's leveling up the tooling and practices that makes what was once hard look easy.

Things scientists using computers can learn from people working in the software industry:

- use a version control oriented workflow

- write extensive tests

- data management, automated data processing/cleaning pipelines, backups

- build generic frameworks

- use continuous integration

- logging and error reporting for long running tasks

- use modern tooling for automating infrastructure and big jobs, rather than manually submitting Slurm jobs via SSH

#notallscientists but the average level of competence is not good and I think the idea that writing software for scientific research is somehow special is backwards and counterproductive.

The_Amp_Walruson Reflow, a language for distributed, incremental data processing in the cloud

Is reflow go only?

is the .rf file format a DSL or an existing language?

The_Amp_Walruson Jolie, the service-oriented programming language

Intra-male competition

Telling that Jenkins is a servant

The_Amp_Walruson Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

Uhuh the WHO has concluded that more power and control should be ceded to the WHO in emergencies:

"""

Identifying a systemic issue, the report said the WHO lacks the power to investigate and act swiftly when confronted with potential outbreaks.

"Technical expert missions can be dispatched to individual countries only with their permission, and a system of preauthorization of missions has not been established," the report said. "Often lengthy negotiations with governments for access by missions are required after an outbreak has been notified."

"""

There's a "systemic issue" where you won't let our 'expert missions' into your country and boss you around.

The_Amp_Walruson Good data scientist, bad data scientist

"This is what you need to be able to do to call yourself a data scientist and become employed. These are the table stakes."

vs.

"Here's some ways to become better, if you want to be better"

The_Amp_Walruson Lelush: How a sulky Russian model became China’s slacker icon

Given how decontexualised the meme is from the source idk why the creator's perspective would be particularly authoritative

The_Amp_Walruson Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?

Typically you would just make a mental note and continue. Walking out mid interview is considered kind of rude and it's worthwhile in the long run to not be rude if you can avoid it.

The_Amp_Walruson Four Basic Truths of Macroeconomics

You can watch online course videos created by the article author: https://mru.org/

They're very high quality

The_Amp_Walruson Don't start a business. Work on a side project instead

I think this would be better phrased as "don't start a [product] business". A services business can't be easily reframed as a side project and doesn't carry the same risks of product-market-fit etc.

The_Amp_Walruson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2021)

Monash School of Public Health | Python Developer for Infectious Disease Modelling | Melbourne, Australia | ONSITE (WFH flexibility)

You would work with a small team of epidemiologists on modelling COVID-19 and tuberculosis in Australia and Asia-Pacific. The team tries to answer questions like:

- what would be the effect of re-opening schools in the Philippines have on the future incidence of COVID-19?

- how many COVID-19 cases do we expect to see in Victorian ICU departments in the next two weeks?

The closest analogue to this position in industry would be "machine learning engineer" since it involves:

- converting mathematical models into robust Python code

- running these models on cloud computing

- handling the plumbing (data processing, cloud storage, CI/CD jobs)

Your teammates, disease modellers and epidemiologists, are analogous to "data scientists": in that they are domain experts who can code and provide the theoretical basis for our models. They require assistance and advice on the best way to approach software development practices such as code structure and testing.

The current codebase is publicly accessible on GitHub (github.com/monash-emu/AuTuMN) and includes:

- a generic framework for building infectious disease models

- specific disease modelling applications (e.g. forecasting the COVID-19 epidemic in the Philippines)

- auxiliary code for visualisation, data processing, cloud computing, unit tests

Pay is 95k to 110k plus 9.5% super

Position description at https://bit.ly/3d3YcmZ (skip to "Position Summary" section)

Official job ad at https://bit.ly/3cYjuSI

Email James Trauer at james.trauer@monash.edu if you're interested.

The_Amp_Walruson Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App

Beeper people: I filled out your Airtable form... how do I give you money?

The_Amp_Walruson EU criticises 'hasty' UK approval of Covid-19 vaccine

What are the object-level facts here? This article is very abstract and is mostly concerned with what various parties are saying.

"They are rushing!"

"No we are not rushing, we are going a good job"

"No! Too fast! We are being more thorough than you because we are waiting for more data."

"We are being rigorous"

The closest we get to any kinds of concrete statements about the review process is:

"The EMA started a rolling review of preliminary data from Pfizer trials on Oct. 6, an emergency procedure aimed at speeding up possible approval, which usually takes at least seven months from reception of full data. The UK regulator launched its own rolling review on Oct. 30, and analysed less data than made available to the EMA."

It's still not clear what "the data" is, what a "rolling review" is and what any of this means from a practical decision-making standpoint. Should UK citizens take the vaccine? What issues could be missed given the UK regulator "analysed less data"?

The_Amp_Walruson Ask HN: How do you go about designing / redesigning a framework API?

This is an API for a Python module which will provides a framework for building disease models.

So, more like requests or flask than a HTTP endpoint.

Eg. https://gist.github.com/MattSegal/36bd43959beaec5cc649f96b75...

The_Amp_Walruson Show HN: Text-to-podcast: Repurpose any content into podcasts

This is a really cool service for content creators who want to easily switch channels.

Descript offers the ability to go the other way with their transcription service https://www.descript.com/

For readers who want to listen to articles that they like, there's the (free?) Pocket text to speech service, plus other sites like mine (https://blogreader.com.au/) which put TTS articles into a podcast for you.

The_Amp_Walruson Show HN: Blog Reader – Listen to blogs that you don't have time to read

As a long-time reader of blogs (eg. slatestarcodex.com, kalzumeus.com, etc) I've sometimes struggled to keep up with all the posts that I'd like to read. I often don't make the time to sit down and plough through some of the longer ones.

I noticed that I listened to a lot of podcasts when commuting, so I made this website to convert interesting blog posts into a podcast. The tech component is mostly glue: the trafilatura scraper + AWS Polly TTS.

Given I find this site pretty useful, I figured that some HN readers would enjoy it as well. Here are some of my favourite articles from the past ~18 months with the accompanying audio:

Doing Business In Japan

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/e096c7623b305cb129c4dd...

A Deep Dive into K-pop

https://dormin.org/2020/09/06/a-deep-dive-into-k-pop/

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/741f2612536071e911f9a9...

Peer review: Troubled from the start

https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-st...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/4712ffd8d05dd1b51df2b7...

The Real Reason Your City Has No Money

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real- reason-your-city-has-no-money

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/1f92611929679af2763b34...

A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics

https://medium.com/software-safety/a-software-engineers-guid...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/0340fb5628b642f8dd4959...

Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China

https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/f749f66d4be0b6899bf25a...

Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"

https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/2571f6e06b9c358d5a9ce3...

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/9008b40fde501cf4ea3c39...

Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Shouldn’t

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/why-deep-learning-...

https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/dd360c22e33717098e7a2c...

The_Amp_Walruson Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

I'm working with some researches on about ~40k lines of Python disease modelling code and these are the things that helped us becomes more productive:

- tests (unit, smoke, acceptance) (eg. https://mattsegal.dev/alternate-test-styles.html, https://understandlegacycode.com/approval-tests/)

- continuous integration (via GitHub actions eg: https://mattsegal.dev/pytest-on-github-actions.html)

- 10x performance improvements via cProfile (https://julien.danjou.info/guide-to-python-profiling-cprofil...)

- getting fast feedback on code changes by visualizing outputs with Streamlit (https://www.streamlit.io/)

- input parameter validation (eg. https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/, https://mattsegal.dev/cerberus-config-validation.html)

- total automation of data processing job (eg. https://www.prefect.io/ - we don't use this but that's the kind of thing we have)

The_Amp_Walruson Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language

It's a misspelling of "hypothetical"

The_Amp_Walruson When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

The hacker known as "Alex" also gave a really fun talk at PyCon AU in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlNkIFipKZ4

The_Amp_Walruson Fast.ai releases new deep learning course, libraries, and book

No. I think the hands-on approach of fastai would probably help you contextualize the theory you learn in CS231N and elsewhere.