Hacker News Reader

sun_n_surfon Jack Ma Says 12-Hour Work Week Could Be the Norm

Came here to say this. What fantasy world are these guys living in? Most people I know barely get weekends to themselves, what with work being pushed passive aggressively through WhatsApp. And no, it is not a choice. For every person who decides to Eat, Pray, Love, there is a hungry guy waiting to work 10 hours a week more to get that job. It is brutal out there.

sun_n_surfon Show HN: I co-wrote a book on training Deep Learning models in Go

What do you mean available here? I can't see a link to the book?

sun_n_surfon The Economics of Kenneth Arrow

Of all the things that I thought I would never see on HN. However, this is a technical review, and needs an advanced formal economics education to appreciate.

sun_n_surfon Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

Hey man, I am like 35 and alone all the time.

sun_n_surfon Internet Data Is Rotting

I actually have a different problem -- not sure it is one that I can legally solve.

I have 10 years of lovingly curated YouTube videos playlists, which, now when I look into the older ones, are a barren wasteland of "Video removed" or "Video not available". It is heartbreaking. Is there any way I can prevent this from happening?

sun_n_surfon Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

Open roles for Azure & GCP might remain open for longer because of lower supply and poorer matching, not because of higher positions being searched for. The AWS talent market probably clears more easily given that it has existed longer.

sun_n_surfon Hindu Nationalists Undertake Effort to Rewrite History in India

Not more of this pearl-clutching sensationalist reporting. India has shown no signs (any more than before) of the Hindu nationalism that was supposed to sweep the nation once Modi came to power. He is no more Hindu nationalist than Shashi "Why I am a Hindu" Tharoor (one can't give it away, the other can't pay for it).

Modi will fall, oh sure, Modi will fall. But mostly because he did not deliver on all his promises of economic miracles, which really, being a pragmatic people, is mostly what Indians care about. Indians are either too smart or too busy (or both) to care about the nuances of history as written in text books for children (which they only read before the exams to regurgiate).

sun_n_surfon Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded 2017 Faraday Medal

Ba dum tiss

sun_n_surf on Coding the History of Deep Learning

Least squares, gradient descent and linear regression separately? I get that he wants to point out the profundity and universality of the ideas encompassed in those techniques (& models; least squares and gradient descent are rightly thought of as (numerical) techniques, whereas the linear regression models is a, well, model) but that is like saying that arithmetic is fundamental to deep learning. Essentially, this "history" only takes you to 1947 and Minsky.

sun_n_surf on C++ 17 is Done

This is not as bad as it sounds. You need to consider the absolute numbers than the relative percentages for languages like C++.
Programming is more accessible than ever before, more jobs require some element of programming than ever before, and more things are getting created using code. This means that people who have never written code before are writing code as a job of work, and are writing it in simpler-to-learn languages.
Newer, simpler programming jobs are acquiring programmers in other languages, not necessarily that C++'s complexity is driving people away from it into the arms of other languages or that C++ is not acquiring newer programmers at the same rates (on existing base) as before.

sun_n_surf on Tor Browser User Manual

Lol, it's a trap. I get an untrusted certificate.

sun_n_surf on Netflix Now Only Has 31 Movies from IMDB's Top 250 List

Netflix is now basically an OTT TV channel. This puts to rest the content aggregation platform model for video which, unlike music, is highly differentiated with higher cost, which rules out commoditization.
This basically reduces online video to two categories: user-generated content platforms and commissioned, curated content platforms. In my view there is only room for one player in the former (YT), but in the latter category, it is basically business as usual for the traditional TV networks.

sun_n_surf on Show HN: A Fortran web framework

`C CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGA`
I laughed way harder at this that it warranted.

sun_n_surf on AWS X1 instances – 1.9 TB of memory

Not sure I quite understand your math here. The largest R3 instance is the r3.8xlarge with 244 GB of memory. 4 times of that would only get you to 1 TB. Also, this: "DRAM is valuable precisely because of its speed", is wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory).

sun_n_surf on Japan's Growing Poverty Defies Glib Explanations

Ah, Noah "I didn't get kicked out of academia for not producing research and being a low-brow blog hack, I left because SFO" Smith.

sun_n_surf on Anna Mikusheva refines time-series econometrics tools to improve forecasting

Time series econometrics on HN? Wow. I have a PhD in Econometrics too. I have met her at seminars and she is a wonderful lady with some good quality publications. But this is a fluff piece and she doesn't have any seminal contributions to the field. I wonder if PCB Phillips has ever made an appearance on HN.